SPATIOTEMPORAL ACTIVITY PATTERNS OF THE CARNIVORE GUILD ON THE APOSTLE ISLANDS, WISCONSIN

Carnivore communities can be diverse and complex, with interactions ranging from predation to niche partitioning. For conservation strategies to be effective, we must understand the magnitude and direction of intraguild interactions. To determine how intraguild interactions may be affecting the spatiotemporal activity distributions of the carnivore guild on the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, I monitored the carnivore population using a grid of camera traps from 2014-2018, during which time I collected 257,358 photographs with 8,869 independent detection events. I used generalized linear mixed effects models at two different scales to test whether subordinate carnivore presence is related to dominant carnivore relative abundance or to island biogeography variables. At the island-level, the island biogeography variables were in the top models for all of the subordinate species, except for fisher, while dominant carnivore relative abundance was in the top models for all of the subordinate species, except for grey fox. At the camera-level, dominant carnivore relative abundance was not a significant predictor or subordinate carnivore presence. To determine whether subordinate carnivores are using temporal partitioning, I calculated temporal overlap between each pair of subordinate and dominant species, and all pairs exhibited high or neutral temporal overlap. Despite the minimal evidence for spatial or temporal partitioning between the carnivore guild on the Apostle Islands, the subordinate carnivores could be partitioning at a finer scale than I was able to measure, highlighting the need to measure niche partitioning at multiple scales.