Territorial movement behaviour in the Eurasian beaver

It can be challenging to observe and quantify natural behaviour in wild free-ranging animals. Species that are reclusive or exploit multiple environments, such as semi-aquatic mammals, may be particularly difficult to study. Fortunately, deployment of animal-borne telemetry devices has rapidly improved our understanding of movement, behaviour, and physiology in free-ranging individuals with increasing spatiotemporal resolution and accuracy. However, deployment of tracking devices often requires multiple capture and handling events of individuals, and ecologists may additionally use long-term individual-based studies to get a better understanding of patterns and mechanisms. This, together with the tracking device itself, may have considerable behavioural effects on the individual and potentially have considerable consequences for individual fitness and the dynamics of the population. In this thesis, we aimed to investigate natural spatiotemporal dynamics in the territorial movement behaviour in free-ranging individuals of a territorial, semi-aquatic mammal, the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber). We combined a long-term individual-based monitoring project (the Norwegian Beaver Project) with sophisticated animal-borne dataloggers to study the natural movement behaviour of various individuals throughout the night and across seasons in habitats that are often difficult to observe (e.g., the aquatic environment). Furthermore, we evaluated short- and long-term effects from repeated capture and handling of individuals which can have considerably effects on the reliability of our ecological research. In the first part, we showed how the combination of fine-scaled dead-reckoned movement tracks together with behavioural segmentation of the tracks can reveal how individuals allocate time to various activities, with focus on aquatic behaviours. We show how individuals perform dives of short duration and allocate little time to diving activities, indicating the energetic constraints. Furthermore, we show how timing and location of diving activities are highly shaped according to the activity peaks of predators, as well as by activities connected to the territory borders. In the second part, we investigated how individuals moved and exploited the territory. Beavers strongly selected, both aquatic and terrestrial, habitats located closer to the riverbank, indicating the energetic costs. Habitat use and movement patterns revealed how beavers perceive the aquatic environment a