Conserving migratory wildlife requires understanding how groups of individuals interact across seasons and landscapes. Telemetry reveals individual movements at large spatiotemporal scales; however, using movement data to define conservation units requires scaling up from individual movements to species- and community-level patterns. We developed a framework to define flyways and identify important sites from telemetry data and applied it to long-term, range-wide tracking data from three species (640 individuals) of sea ducks: namely, North American scoters (Melanitta spp). Our network of 88 nodes included both multispecies hotspots and areas uniquely important to individual species. We found limited spatial overlap between scoters wintering on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, with differing connectivity patterns between coasts. Finally, we identified four multispecies conservation units that did not correspond to traditional management flyways. From this approach, we show how individual movements can be used to quantify range-wide connectivity of migratory species and reveal gaps in conservation strategies.

中文翻译：

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使用网络分析评估保护单位：海鸭案例研究

保护迁徙野生动物需要了解个体群体如何跨季节和景观相互作用。遥测揭示大时空尺度的个体运动；然而，使用迁徙数据来定义保护单位需要从个体迁徙扩大到物种和群落层面的模式。我们开发了一个框架来定义飞行路线并从遥测数据中识别重要地点，并将其应用于来自三种海鸭（640 只）的长期、全范围跟踪数据：即北美短尾鸭（Melanitta spp）。我们的 88 个节点网络包括多物种热点和对单个物种特别重要的区域。我们发现在北美大西洋和太平洋海岸越冬的苏格兰人之间的空间重叠有限，海岸之间的连通模式不同。最后，我们确定了四个与传统管理飞行路线不对应的多物种保护单位。通过这种方法，我们展示了如何利用个体运动来量化迁徙物种的大范围连通性，并揭示保护策略中的差距。