Predicting micro thermal habitat of lizards in a dynamic thermal environment

详细信息	查看全文 | 推荐本文 |

• 作者：Teng Fei^a ; ^b ; ^fei@itc.nl ; ^{only4john@gmail.com} ; Andrew K. Skidmore^a ; Valentijn Venus^a ; Tiejun Wang^a ; Bert Toxopeus^a ; Meng Bian^b ; Yaolin Liu^b
• 关键词：Lizard ; Thermal habitat use ; Cellular automata ; Behavioural thermoregulation ; Body temperature model ; Timon lepidus
• 刊名：Ecological Modelling
• 出版年：2012
• 期刊代码：49_03043800
• 类别：cp
• 出版时间：24 April, 2012
• 卷：231
• 期：Complete
• 页码：126-133
• 文件大小：1186 K

摘要

Understanding behavioural thermoregulation and its consequences is a central topic in ecology. In this study, a spatial explicit model was developed to simulate the movement and thermal habitat use of lizards in a controlled environment. The model incorporates a lizard's transient body temperatures with a cellular automaton (CA) algorithm and links the physiology knowledge of the animal with the spatial utilization of its microhabitat. The model assumed that a lizard tries to maintain its preferred body temperature in a dynamic thermal environment by continuously selecting positions with different thermal conditions. The sequence of chosen positions formed a chain defining the individual's path, to be later aggregated into a map of thermal habitat use. An experiment was designed to test the model. An ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) was kept in a terrarium with controlled dynamic thermal environment, and the thermal environment as well as the movement of the lizard were recorded by a variety of sensors. The model was tested to predict the spatial utilization of a lizard's thermal habitat in the terrarium based on three categories: high, moderate and low occupancy. The simulated results were compared with observations from the animal experiment. The predicted overall pattern of the micro-habitat occupancy of the lizard within 4 days matched the observation, at an overall accuracy of 75.7%. The results suggest that thermal habitat use by lizards in a controlled environment may be predicted by the integrated model of the lizard's body temperature and the CA algorithm.