B.B. Manly – författare

The current literature on resource selection by animals is a maze of methodologies for data collection and interpretation. Field biologists are crying out for a guide through the labyrinth. This book aims to provide such a guide. It aims to give a clear and consistent framework for the study of how animals select their resources (food and habitat) by taking the reader through different types of study design. It is a valuable handbook for the field biologist, especially those concerned with the management and conservation of wildlife. The authors have clearly identified the need to pull together the diffuse literature, and biologists should improve their experimental design, methodology and analysis with this book This book should be of interest to population biologists, ecologists, wildlife managers, conservation biologists, fisheries managers and biostatisticians.

We have written this book as a guide to the design and analysis of field studies of resource selection, concentrating primarily on statistical aspects of the comparison of the use and availability of resources of different types. Our in­ tended audience is field ecologists in general and wildlife biologists in particular who are attempting to measure the extent to which real animal populations are selective in their choice of food and habitat. As such, we have made no attempt to address those aspects of theoretical ecology that are concerned with how animals might choose their resources if they acted in an optimal manner. The book is based on the concept of a resource selection function, where this is a function of characteristics measured on resource units such that its value for a unit is proportional to the probability of that unit being used. We argue that this concept leads to a unified theory for the analysis and interpretation of data on resource selection and can replace many ad hoc statistical methods that have been used in the past.