Pressing flowers between pages…
Male songbirds sing on the edge of their territory to warn away competing males. The mountain white-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys oriantha) prefers to sing on the edge of willows and spruce trees. High quality territory is determined by the availability of food, water and shelter. Meanwhile, lower quality territory lacks these key resources and reduce the chances of the holding male’s breeding success. I hypothesized that perimeter and area of a territory are directly correlated to elevation. However, due to unexpected restrictions in sample size, my analysis was strictly descriptive. For this study, I walked through the willows and recorded the GPS coordinates of the singing spots of each male. The median total territory area was 4047.2 meters squared and a total territory perimeter of 83.2 meters squared. I constructed four GIS maps which allowed the visualization of the variety of territory shapes.
Knowledge graph centered on Factors that affect territory size in Mountain Whi with 17 nodes and 56 connections. Top connected: Delphinium, Spruce, Potentilla, elevational gradients, Veratrum.
Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.
7 references to works outside the Knowledge Commons