Meeting Abstract
Invasive alien species (IAS) can have significant ecological and economic impacts upon invading new habitats by substantially altering ecological interactions and ecosystem-level processes, and cost billions of dollars through impacts to agriculture, infrastructure and human health. Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are one of the most successful and detrimental IAS, worldwide. As ecological generalists, they quickly adapt to new environments within their introduced range. We used an extensive GPS database of wild pig movement across the U.S., continuous-time movement models, and resource selection functions to address use and selection for agricultural resources and assessed how the availability of non-agricultural resources on a landscape affected the use of and selection for agricultural resources. At the home range scale, pigs used the most abundant crop type in proportion to its availability, and increased canopy cover decreased the amount of time spent in agricultural resources. Within-home range, presence of crops affected movement trajectories and varied by time of day where pigs tended to move toward crops in the evening and away in the morning. Wild pigs also traveled more slowly in areas of high canopy cover and were most likely to select for crops during peak planting and harvesting periods, and selected for crops less often when non-agricultural resources were abundant. Our results provide the first large-scale evidence that wild pig crop-use predictably changes with the availability of non-agricultural resources across spatial scales. Accurate estimates of agricultural crop-use can improve projection of crop damage and aid in predicting resource-use and movement across a large landscape, especially in terms of population expansion.
