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

Accurate evaluations of habitat preference are key to understanding optimal conditions for wildlife survival and reproduction. Habitat selection, however, is usually evaluated using a single index of preference, and congruence among multiple, relevant indices of preference is examined rarely. We assessed the concordance between patterns of habitat preference using three different indices of breeding site preference in a migratory songbird. Specifically, we compared the chronology of territorial establishment, pair formation, and reproductive initiation of the Brewer’s sparrow (Spizella brewerii), along a gradient of surface disturbance associated with natural gas development in Wyoming, USA during 2019. We expected all three indices to demonstrate a preference for breeding sites with less surface disturbance, where reproductive success is known to be higher. By contrast, however, preferences were consistently invariant with respect to surface disturbance across all indices. If the pattern of suboptimal selection of breeding sites that we identified is generalizable across other populations of migratory birds affected by energy development, the resultant lower fitness in those areas may exacerbate population declines. Our results suggest that traditional, single-index approaches to the study of habitat selection, if chosen carefully, may provide adequate inference on habitat preferences. The simultaneous examination of multiple indices of preference across a diversity of systems, however, would help clarify the contexts under which preference metrics could become decoupled.