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31 March 2020 Home range size and resource use by swift foxes in northeastern Montana
Andrew R. Butler, Kristy L.S. Bly, Heather Harris, Robert M. Inman, Axel Moehrenschlager, Donelle Schwalm, David S. Jachowski
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Abstract

Swift foxes (Vulpes velox) are endemic to the Great Plains of North America, but were extirpated from the northern portion of their range by the mid-1900s. Despite several reintroductions to the Northern Great Plains, there remains a ∼350 km range gap between the swift fox population along the Montana and Canada border and that in northeastern Wyoming and northwestern South Dakota. A better understanding of what resources swift foxes use along the Montana and Canada border region will assist managers to facilitate connectivity among populations. From 2016 to 2018, we estimated the home range size and evaluated resource use within the home ranges of 22 swift foxes equipped with Global Positioning System tracking collars in northeastern Montana. Swift fox home ranges in our study were some of the largest ever recorded, averaging (± SE) 42.0 km2 ± 4.7. Our results indicate that both environmental and anthropogenic factors influenced resource use. At the population level, resource use increased by 3.3% for every 5.0% increase in percent grasslands. Relative probability of use decreased by 7.9% and 7.4% for every kilometer away from unpaved roads and gas well sites, respectively, and decreased by 3.0% and 11.3% for every one-unit increase in topographic roughness and every 0.05 increase in normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), respectively. Our study suggests that, to reestablish connectivity among swift fox populations in Montana, managers should aim to maintain large corridors of contiguous grasslands at a landscape scale, a process that likely will require having to work with multiple property owners.

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society of Mammalogists. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
Andrew R. Butler, Kristy L.S. Bly, Heather Harris, Robert M. Inman, Axel Moehrenschlager, Donelle Schwalm, and David S. Jachowski "Home range size and resource use by swift foxes in northeastern Montana," Journal of Mammalogy 101(3), 684-696, (31 March 2020). https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyaa030
Received: 5 June 2019; Accepted: 8 March 2020; Published: 31 March 2020
KEYWORDS
conservation translocation
grasslands
reintroduction
resource utilization function
Vulpes velox
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