Spatial Ecology of Eastern Copperheads in Fragmented and Unfragmented Habitats

Episodic Gregariousness Leads to Level-Dependent Core Habitats: A Case Study in Eastern Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix)

Characterizing the complex relationships between animals and their habitats is essential for effective wildlife conservation and management. Wildlife-habitat selection is influenced by multiple life-history requirements, which act over varying spatial and temporal scales, and result in dispersion patterns that can differ across ecological levels. For example, sites that attract intense communal use (e.g., hibernacula and communal basking sites) are often a subset of the habitats required by individuals for survival. Despite the conservation importance of both individually and communally significant habitats, snake habitat models rarely incorporate information about both individual and population-level activity. We used 4 years of radiotelemetry data from eastern copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) to evaluate the presence of multilevel spatial habitat responses and whether they revealed conservation-relevant information. We related individual and population space use intensity to underlying habitat covariates to determine whether predictors of copperhead spatial activity were level-dependent, and whether individual core habitats differed by sex and reproductive state. Copperheads' episodic gregariousness resulted in spatial and environmental separation between individual and communal core habitats. Population-level use was greatest in rocky, forested habitats associated with winter brumation and spring basking, whereas individual-level use was greatest in open habitats with woody debris associated with foraging and reproductive behaviors. Male core habitats were open and thickly vegetated while those of females were moderately forested, with gravid female core habitats containing ample woody debris. Our findings demonstrate that multilevel spatial patterns carry conservation-relevant information about snake habitat relationships. We suspect that behaviors leading to multilevel spatial patterns exist in many wildlife species whose individual spatial activities overlap around shared resources.