Testing ordered hypotheses in animal resource selection studies

Many studies on animal resource selection involve recording the number of t imes radio-collared animals are observed in a finite number of resource cat egories (e.g., habitats). A general objective of these studies is to determ ine if the animals are using resources disproportionately to resource avail ability. In this paper. we propose testing ordered resource selections. The advantage of testing ordered resource selections hypotheses is that a rese archer can evaluate specific resource selection relationships beyond the mu ltiple comparison testing framework. We use order-restricted inference theo ry to construct estimators and hypothesis tests for these types of resource selection tests. Detailed illustrations using data from a radio-tracking s tudy on gray partridges illustrate the: techniques.