Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Colorado
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Colorado Project


Wildlife Corridor Identification

August 2012 - January 2016


Personnel

Participating Agencies

  • Rocky Mountain National Parks

Problem statement: Western carnivore species navigate a complex matrix of land types as they undergo their life history. In Colorado, several species are tracked with a variety of telemetry devices to understand vital rates and demographics, but relatively little was known the movement of these carnivores. So What? Why this research matters: The ability to formally make inferences about large-scale spatial and temporal movement of wild carnivores in Colorado helps us understand the natural history of the species and rigorously quantifies their space use and behavior. Collaboration/Partners: This project is in collaboration with scientists at the Colorado Parks and Wildlife and National Park Service. Research That Informs Decisions: Formal statistical models that account for the various sources of uncertainty in telemetry data help us make dependable inference about movement of large carnivores in Colorado that can help influence management decisions about landscape connectivity, development, and land use.

Research Publications Publication Date
Buderman, F.E., M.B. Hooten, J.S. Ivan, and T.M. Shenk. 2016. A functional model for characterizing long distance movement behavior. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7(3): 264–273. March 2016
Buderman, F.E., M.B. Hooten, J. Ivan, and T. Shenk. (2018). Large-scale movement behavior in a reintroduced predator population. Ecography, 41: 126-139. January 2018