DOI: 10.5061/dryad.k3q6v8j
title: Data from: Predicting functional responses in agro-ecosystems from animal movement data to improve management of invasive pests

description: Functional responses describe how changing resource availability affects
 consumer resource use, thus providing a mechanistic approach to prediction
 of the invasibility and potential damage of invasive alien species (IAS).
 However, functional responses can be context-dependent, varying with
 resource characteristics and availability, consumer attributes, and
 environmental variables. Identifying context-dependencies can allow
 invasion and damage risk to be predicted across different ecoregions.
 Understanding how ecological factors shape the functional response in
 agro-ecosystems can improve predictions of hotspots of highest impact and
 inform strategies to mitigate damage across locations with varying crop
 types and availability. We linked heterogeneous movement data across
 different agro-ecosystems to predict ecologically-driven variability in
 the functional responses. We applied our approach to wild pigs (Sus
 scrofa), one of the most successful and detrimental IAS worldwide where
 agricultural resource depredation is an important driver of spread and
 establishment. We used continental-scale movement data within
 agro-ecosystems to quantify the functional response of agricultural
 resources relative to availability of crops and natural forage. We
 hypothesized that wild pigs would selectively use crops more often when
 natural forage resources were low. We also examined how individual
 attributes such as sex, crop type, and resource stimulus such as distance
 to crops altered the magnitude of the functional response. There was a
 strong agricultural functional response where crop use was an accelerating
 function of crop availability at low density (Type III) and was highly
 context-dependent. As hypothesized, there was a reduced response of crop
 use with increasing crop availability when non-agricultural resources were
 more available, emphasizing that crop damage levels are likely to be
 highly heterogeneous depending on surrounding natural resources and
 temporal availability of crops. We found significant effects of crop type
 and sex – with males spending 20% more time and visiting crops 58% more
 often than females, and both sexes showing different functional responses
 depending on crop type. Our application demonstrates how commonly
 collected animal movement data can be used to understand
 context-dependencies in resource use to improve our understanding of pest
 foraging behavior, with implications for prioritizing spatio-temporal
 hotspots of potential economic loss in agro-ecosystems.
description: Wilber et al.
 wild_pig_functional_response_dataThe functional response
 data used in the manuscript "Predicting functional responses in
 agro-ecosystems from animal movement data to improve management of
 invasive pests" published in Ecological Applications. These data are
 the result of processing each wild pig's movement data using
 continuous-time movement models (described in the manuscript). These data
 give the monthly statistics of crop-use, agricultural covariates, and
 non-agricultural covariates for each pig over its collaring time and were
 used to make inference on the agricultural functional response of wild
 pigs.