Testing Ordered Hypotheses in Animal Resource Selection Studies

Many studies on animal resource selection involve recording the number of times radio-collared animals are observed in a finite number of resource categories (e.g., habitats). A general objective of these studies is to determine if the animals are using resources disproportionately to resource availability. In this paper, we propose testing ordered resource selections. The advantage of testing ordered resource selections hypotheses is that a researcher can evaluate specific resource selection relationships beyond the multiple comparison testing framework. We use order-restricted inference theory to construct estimators and hypothesis tests for these types of resource selection tests. Detailed illustrations using data from a radio-tracking study on gray partridges illustrate the techniques.