Assessing space use and landscape navigation
To determine the individual home ranges of the seven collared hyenas, we used the ‘adehabitatHR’ package in R (R Core Team, 2018) to assess 50% and 95% kernel utilization distributions (KUD) and calculated overlap among home ranges.
To determine landscape feature selection by spotted hyenas, we derived resource selection functions (RSFs) using the ‘lme4’ package in R, using only the six collared hyenas (3 male and 3 female) whose collars remained active throughout the study. Random points generated were equal to the number of GPS points used, and we found no evidence of collinearity among our covariates (Dellinger et al. 2013). We assessed resource selection using generalized linear mixed-effects models with a logit link. Using the raster package and base R, we scaled the following covariates for use in the RSFs: normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI; 30m, Landsat 8), elevation, slope, distance to rivers, distance to lakes, distance to roads, and distance to protected area boundaries. NDVI in this study site can serve as a proxy for land cover, because areas of higher NDVI are generally brush or forest, whereas lower NDVI areas are typically grasslands. After initial data exploration, we included an interaction term—individual and distance to boundary—as a random effect in our candidate model to control for variation in individual boldness. We assessed a global model (for all hyenas) and compared global seasonal (rainy and dry) models, as well as models for hyenas whose dens were in LNNP (n=3), and for hyenas whose dens were in Soysambu Conservancy (n=3). We also assessed and compared models with the following combinations of variables: ecological variables only, ecological and infrastructure, infrastructure only, infrastructure and human perception/experience, and human perception/experience only. Models were ranked based on their Akaike Information Criterion (AIC; Burnham & Anderson 2002), and models within Δ AIC ≤2 were retained to use when assessing coefficient values.