The current literature on resource selection by animals is a maze of methodologies for data collection and interpretation. Field biologists need a guide through the labyrinth. This book provides such a guide. It gives 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 an invaluable 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 will greatly improve their experimental design, methodology, and analysis with this book.

The second edition of this popular book has been updated to include many developments in the last few years. There is new material on discrete choice models, the analysis of data from geographical information systems, compositional analysis, Mahalanobis distance methods, and neural networks and related approaches.

Resource Selection by Animals:

• is an invaluable guide for field biologists;
• provides a consistent framework for study of resource selection (food and habitat) by animals;
• is a unique guide, and is the only book which covers this critical topic in such depth; and
• is particularly useful to wildlife managers and conservation biologists.

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 intended audience is field ecologists in general and, in particular, wildlife and fisheries biologists 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 (RSF), where this is a function of characteristics measured on resourceunits 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.