  1. Anthropogenic actions cause rapid ecological changes, meaning that animals
have to respond before they have time to adapt. Tools to quantify emergent
spatial patterns from animal-habitat interaction mechanisms are vital for
predicting the population-level effects of such changes.
  2. Environmental perturbations are particularly prevalent in the Amazon
rainforest, and have a profound effect on fragmentation-sensitive insectivorous
bird flocks. Therefore it is important to be able to predict the effects of
such changes on the flocks' space-use patterns.
  3. We use a step selection function (SSF) approach to uncover environmental
drivers behind movement choices. This is used to construct a mechanistic model,
from which we derive predicted utilization distributions (home ranges) of
flocks.
  4. We show that movement decisions are significantly influenced by canopy
height and topography, but not resource depletion and renewal. We quantify the
magnitude of these effects and demonstrate that they are helpful for
understanding various heterogeneous aspects of space use. We compare our
results to recent analytic derivations of space use, demonstrating that they
are only accurate when assuming that there is no persistence in the animals'
movement.
  5. Our model can be translated into other environments or hypothetical
scenarios, such as those given by proposed future anthropogenic actions, to
make predictions of spatial patterns in bird flocks. Furthermore, our approach
is quite general, so could be used to predict the effects of habitat changes on
spatial patterns for a wide variety of animal communities.
