Understanding how animals use space and access key resources can offer critical insights that can inform management and conservation actions. This dissertation explores space use and movement behavior for three large mammalian species in South America at different scales and with different emphases. In Chapter 1, I study vicuña space use in the southern end of the species’ range and compare this with results from other parts of the vicuña range. My study offers the first estimates of vicuña home range sizes using telemetry data and compares these with results from previous studies. Additionally, I assess how vicuñas at my study site share space with conspecifics from other families, and if vicuñas display the strong territorial behavior displayed by the species in other parts of their range. Finally, I investigate how environmental factors may affect vicuña space use, including home range sizes, space-sharing and diel migration patterns. In Chapter 2, I study puma space use in three protected areas in the high Andean and Patagonian steppes and answer questions about the linkages between heterogeneity in the landscape and how pumas use space and move around in their home ranges. As a carnivore species known for its flexibility in adapting to very different habitat conditions, do pumas respond to differences in habitats and terrain factors with changes in behavior? What are the specific ways in which varying landscape variables affect this space use? Do different landscape factors affect behavior across study sites? Does changing landscape heterogeneity affect other factors such as distances moved by pumas? Chapter 3 comprises an assessment of connectivity between key jaguar habitats. First, I use a large, publicly available jaguar GPS telemetry dataset to develop a movement resistance layer, incorporating key environmental and anthropogenic variables known to facilitate or impede jaguar movement across the species’ range in the Americas. Next, I identify corridor areas connecting key jaguar habitats and other protected areas that are likely to be important from a jaguar conservation perspective across the jaguar range. These identified corridors may offer important strategic inputs towards range-level jaguar conservation strategies to ensure connectivity and dispersal between jaguar populations. Together, these analyses offer behavioral and ecological insights that can inform conservation and management actions for continued persistence of these species and their movement across landscapes.

The ecological consequences of animal behaviors range from the fitness of individuals to the functioning of ecosystems. As historic patterns of animal behaviors change in response to changes in climate, land use, and human presence, there is a growing need to better understand the mechanisms by which wildlife perceive and respond to anthropogenic and environmental influences. Understanding how and why animals alter their behavior in anthropogenic spaces requires moving beyond general descriptions of behavioral patterns to investigate the biological mechanisms underpinning these behavioral responses. Such investigations would fill gaps in current theories of animal cognition and behavioral ecology while improving effectiveness of management and conservation efforts. In this dissertation, I aim to help fill these knowledge gaps by investigating the behavioral ecology of large carnivores, their ungulate prey, and migratory wildlife moving through areas where people live, work, and play. In chapter 1, I provide a brief introduction to key themes of wildlife behavioral ecology in the context of anthropogenic influence. In chapter 2, I work with collaborators to synthesize key insights from migration restoration efforts spanning diverse taxa and ecosystems. We use lessons learned to draw broad inference about the conditions under which lost migratory behaviors can be restored. In chapter 3, I use new data collected from wolf kill sites to investigate how humans change natural patterns of predation on native ungulates. Building on this work, chapter 4 investigates how ungulates perceive and respond to these human-influenced patterns of wolf predation risk. I conclude by discussing the considerable opportunities that exist to restore and facilitate the wildlife behaviors on which ecosystems are built. I urge ecologists, natural resource professionals, and policymakers to expand their concept of conservation beyond physical landscapes and species to include the behavior of wild animals moving through an increasingly human-dominated world.

The recovery of large carnivores beyond protected areas presents significant conservation and management challenges as both wildlife and humans adapt to shared landscapes. This issue is particularly acute in working landscapes where carnivores, such as wolves, frequently prey on livestock, causing hardship for rural ranching communities and potentially hindering carnivore recovery efforts. Thus, research investigating the factors driving and mitigating carnivore depredation on livestock is needed to better inform conflict reduction management practices. This study takes place in a working lands frontier east of Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming, near the towns of Cody and Meeteetse, where ranchers and wildlife managers have contended with wolf-livestock conflict for over two decades. Given that conflict dynamics are influenced by both wildlife behavior and management decisions, this research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate ecological and social dimensions of conflict. The first two chapters focus on predator-prey dynamics between wolves and migratory elk, as prey availability and distribution are believed to impact wolf-livestock conflict patterns. In Chapter 1, I use elk and wolf GPS collar data to investigate how wolves respond to seasonal elk migrations and describe conditions conducive to migratory coupling and decoupling. In Chapter 2, I collected wolf predation data from kill sites in winter and summer to characterize wolf seasonal predation patterns. In Chapter 3, I delve into the human dimensions of conflict mitigation using data from in-depth interviews with ranchers and wildlife managers, relationships developed during the course of the ecological research. I investigated the socioeconomic challenges of mitigating conflict by identifying factors that influence the adoption of conflict reduction practices and examining the roots of social conflict and intolerance towards wolves. Highlighting social constraints to conflict mitigation offers valuable lessons for communities facing similar challenges with recovering wolf populations. These findings can guide wildlife managers, wolf conservationists, and researchers in developing effective conflict mitigation strategies that balance the needs of both wolves and people, as wolves, already the most widespread large carnivore in the Northern Hemisphere, continue to expand their range.

To combat declines in biodiversity, conservationists are increasingly looking to restore wildlife populations through the reintroduction of select species, the establishment of protected areas, and the use of human-wildlife conflict mitigation tools. A primary objective of wildlife restoration efforts is to reestablish trophic interactions crucial for the function and structure of ecosystems. However, recovering wildlife populations are often returning to novel ecosystems with altered environments and new species compositions. These novel ecosystems may then complicate the outcomes of wildlife restoration efforts. In Chapter 1, I provide a brief introduction to key themes of wildlife restoration in novel ecosystems. In Chapter 2, I evaluate the outcomes of wildlife translocations around the world. Specifically, I evaluate whether the inclusion of human dimensions in the planning and execution of a translocation improves success. Next, for my final two chapters, I zoom in to Argentine Patagonia to better understand how a novel environment impacts the outcomes of wildlife restoration. In Chapter 3, I assess how roads influence the habitat selection of the most widespread large herbivore in Patagonia, the guanaco. In addition to the creation of novel landscapes, habitat restoration in the region has led to a novel interaction between pumas and penguins. In Chapter 4, I test how this novel interaction between pumas and penguins impacts puma behavior and their population. Then building on these results, for Chapter 5, I examine the impacts of the puma-penguin interaction on guanacos, the primary prey for guanacos throughout Patagonia. Finally in Chapter 6, I close with some concluding remarks about wildlife restoration in novel ecosystems.