Predicting micro thermal habitat of lizards in a dynamic thermal environment

Teng Fei, Andrew K. Skidmore, Valentijn Venus, Tiejun Wang, Bert Toxopeus, Meng Bian and Yaolin Liu

Ecological Modelling, 2012, vol. 231, issue C, 126-133

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Lizard; Thermal habitat use; Cellular automata; Behavioural thermoregulation; Body temperature model; Timon lepidus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380012000804
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:231:y:2012:i:c:p:126-133

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2012.02.012

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath

More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().