Inès Khazar, CEFS, INRAE

In a context of habitat fragmentation caused by anthropogenic activities, maintaining connectivity between populations is crucial for the long-term preservation of species. At the regional scale, this connectivity is mainly achieved through dispersal. Predictions of biological corridors are efficient management tools to inform conservation and reintroduction actions. Such predictions should ideally be derived from the movement behaviour of dispersing individuals, that explore novel and/or unfamiliar environments during the exploration phase, yet these data are rarely available, particularly for species targeted by conservation programs. Wildlife translocations or reintroductions offer an alternative to understand the movement of individuals outside of familiar areas into novel environments, in a quasi-experimental set-up. As in dispersing individuals, explorative behaviour is expected to predominate over spatial memory (i.e. the exploitation of familiar areas through memory) during translocation, at least in the early phase. Studying the movements of translocated individuals may therefore provide a proxy for dispersal, offering insights into spatial connectivity and home range formation that may otherwise be difficult to obtain in the wild. Using GPS and VHF data from 11 translocated brown bear individuals in the Pyrenees (France and Spain), we first segmented the trajectories into exploration and settlement phases. We contrasted bear movement behaviour and resource selection depending on the movement phase and quantified phase-specific spatial connectivity. We showed that bear movement behaviour differed significantly among behavioural phases, with heightened risk-taking toward humans during exploration, leading to cascading effects on connectivity estimates and corridor delineation for regional conservation planning. Wildlife translocations offer an interesting experimental set-up to understand the mechanisms at the root of home range formation in wild animals.