Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2010 Jul 27;365(1550):2245-54. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0083.
Models of habitat preference are widely used to quantify animal-habitat relationships, to describe and predict differential space use by animals, and to identify habitat that is important to an animal (i.e. that is assumed to influence fitness). Quantifying habitat preference involves the statistical comparison of samples of habitat use and availability. Preference is therefore contingent upon both of these samples. The inferences that can be made from use versus availability designs are influenced by subjectivity in defining what is available to the animal, the problem of quantifying the accessibility of available resources and the framework in which preference is modelled. Here, we describe these issues, document the conditional nature of preference and establish the limits of inferences that can be drawn from these analyses. We argue that preference is not interpretable as reflecting the intrinsic behavioural motivations of the animal, that estimates of preference are not directly comparable among different samples of availability and that preference is not necessarily correlated with the value of habitat to the animal. We also suggest that preference is context-dependent and that functional responses in preference resulting from changing availability are expected. We conclude by describing advances in analytical methods that begin to resolve these issues.
栖息地偏好模型被广泛用于量化动物-栖息地关系，描述和预测动物的差异空间利用，并确定对动物重要的栖息地（即假设会影响其适应性）。量化栖息地偏好涉及对栖息地使用和可用性样本的统计比较。因此，偏好取决于这两个样本。使用与可用性设计得出的推论受到以下几个方面的主观性影响：动物可用资源的定义、量化可用资源可及性的问题以及偏好建模的框架。在这里，我们描述了这些问题，记录了偏好的条件性质，并确定了可以从这些分析中得出的推论的局限性。我们认为，不能将偏好解释为反映动物内在行为动机，不同可用性样本之间的偏好估计不能直接比较，而且偏好不一定与栖息地对动物的价值相关。我们还认为，偏好是依赖于上下文的，并且由于可用性的变化，偏好的功能反应是可以预期的。最后，我们描述了一些分析方法的进展，这些方法开始解决这些问题。
