Little is known about the factors that drive nonstationarity and inter-individual differences in realized habitat niches and species-environment relationships. We explored this topic by developing individual habitat selection models for 14 wildcat hybrids distributed across Scotland, and assessed how differences in their predicted probabilities of occurrence were related to factors including (1) geographic distance, (2) multivariate ecological distance, (3) difference in degree of hybridization and (4) difference in sex (male vs female). We found that the individual models were exceptionally effective in predicting the habitat use and occurrence of the particular individuals on whose data they were trained, but were generally highly divergent and not transferable among individuals. We conducted a reciprocal validation approach where we calculated the AUC for each individual model, predicting the occurrence patterns of the 13 other individuals. We then fit regression and nonparametric splines to evaluate the impacts of geographical distance, ecological distance, hybridization distance and difference in the sex of individuals in the ability of individual wildcat hybrid habitat models to predict the occurrences of other individuals. We found that, of the four factors assessed, ecological distance was supported as being inversely related to ability of a model from one individual to predict occurrence of another individual. The other three factors were not strongly related to differences in reciprocal model predictive ability. This suggests that ecological differences where individual wildcat hybrids reside drive differences in their habitat selection, but that geographical distance, degree of genetic hybridization and difference in the sex of individuals are not consistently associated with differences in model prediction or reciprocal validation performance. These results highlight the effect of ecological limiting factors, and the importance of nonstationary limiting factors in determining the habitat they select, their expressed species-environment relationship and the description of their realized habitat niches.

中文翻译：

---

解释苏格兰野猫杂交种栖息地关系的个体间差异

对于导致已实现的栖息地生态位和物种-环境关系的非平稳性和个体间差异的因素知之甚少。我们通过为分布在苏格兰的 14 种野猫杂交种开发个体栖息地选择模型来探索这个主题，并评估了它们预测发生概率的差异与因素的关系，包括 (1) 地理距离、(2) 多元生态距离、(3) 差异杂交程度和（4）性别差异（男性与女性）。我们发现，个体模型在预测其训练数据所依据的特定个体的栖息地使用和发生情况方面非常有效，但通常存在很大差异，并且在个体之间不可转移。我们采用了相互验证方法，计算每个模型的 AUC，预测其他 13 个个体的发生模式。然后，我们拟合回归和非参数样条来评估地理距离、生态距离、杂交距离和个体性别差异对个体野猫杂交栖息地模型预测其他个体发生的能力的影响。我们发现，在评估的四个因素中，生态距离被认为与一个个体的模型预测另一个个体发生的能力成反比。其他三个因素与倒数模型预测能力的差异没有很强的相关性。这表明个体野猫杂交个体所居住的生态差异导致其栖息地选择的差异，但地理距离、遗传杂交程度和个体性别差异并不总是与模型预测或相互验证性能的差异相关。这些结果强调了生态限制因素的影响，以及非平稳限制因素在决定它们选择的栖息地、它们表达的物种-环境关系以及它们实现的栖息地生态位的描述方面的重要性。