Great leaps forward in scientific understanding are often spurred by innovations in technology. The explosion of miniature sensors that are driving the boom in consumer electronics, such as smart ...phones, gaming platforms, and wearable fitness devices, are now becoming available to ecologists for remotely monitoring the activities of wild animals. While half a century ago researchers were attaching balloons to the backs of seals to measure their movement, today ecologists have access to an arsenal of sensors that can continuously measure most aspects of an animal's state (e.g., location, behavior, caloric expenditure, interactions with other animals) and external environment (e.g., temperature, salinity, depth). This technology is advancing our ability to study animal ecology by allowing researchers to (1) answer questions about the physiology, behavior, and ecology of wild animals in situ that would have previously been limited to tests on model organisms in highly controlled settings, (2) study cryptic or wide-ranging animals that have previously evaded investigation, and (3) develop and test entirely new theories. Here we explore how ecologists are using these tools to answer new questions about the physiological performance, energetics, foraging, migration, habitat selection, and sociality of wild animals, as well as collect data on the environments in which they live.
Tractable conservation measures for long-lived species require the intersection between protection of biologically relevant life history stages and a socioeconomically feasible setting. To protect ...breeding adults, we require knowledge of animal movements, how movement relates to political boundaries, and our confidence in spatial analyses of movement. We used satellite tracking and a switching state-space model to determine the internesting movements of olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) (n = 18) in Central Africa during two breeding seasons (2007-08, 2008-09). These movements were analyzed in relation to current park boundaries and a proposed transboundary park between Gabon and the Republic of Congo, both created to reduce unintentional bycatch of sea turtles in marine fisheries. We additionally determined confidence intervals surrounding home range calculations. Turtles remained largely within a 30 km radius from the original nesting site before departing for distant foraging grounds. Only 44.6 percent of high-density areas were found within the current park but the proposed transboundary park would incorporate 97.6 percent of high-density areas. Though tagged individuals originated in Gabon, turtles were found in Congolese waters during greater than half of the internesting period (53.7 percent), highlighting the need for international cooperation and offering scientific support for a proposed transboundary park. This is the first comprehensive study on the internesting movements of solitary nesting olive ridley sea turtles, and it suggests the opportunity for tractable conservation measures for female nesting olive ridleys at this and other solitary nesting sites around the world. We draw from our results a framework for cost-effective protection of long-lived species using satellite telemetry as a primary tool.
Energetic demands and fear of predators are considered primary factors shaping animal behavior, and both are likely drivers of movement decisions that ultimately determine the spatial ecology of ...wildlife. Yet energetic constraints on movement imposed by the physical landscape have only been considered separately from those imposed by risk avoidance, limiting our understanding of how short-term movement decisions scale up to affect long-term space use. Here, we integrate the costs of both physical terrain and predation risk into a common currency, energy, and then quantify their effects on the short-term movement and long-term spatial ecology of a large carnivore living in a human-dominated landscape. Using high-resolution GPS and accelerometer data from collared pumas (
), we calculated the short-term (i.e., 5-min) energetic costs of navigating both rugged physical terrain and a landscape of risk from humans (major sources of both mortality and fear for our study population). Both the physical and risk landscapes affected puma short-term movement costs, with risk having a relatively greater impact by inducing high-energy but low-efficiency movement behavior. The cumulative effects of short-term movement costs led to reductions of 29% to 68% in daily travel distances and total home range area. For male pumas, long-term patterns of space use were predominantly driven by the energetic costs of human-induced risk. This work demonstrates that, along with physical terrain, predation risk plays a primary role in shaping an animal's "energy landscape" and suggests that fear of humans may be a major factor affecting wildlife movements worldwide.
AIM: We investigated the effects of disease on the local abundances and distributions of species at continental scales by examining the impacts of white‐nose syndrome, an infectious disease of ...hibernating bats, which has recently emerged in North America. LOCATION: North America and Europe. METHODS: We used four decades of population counts from 1108 populations to compare the local abundances of bats in North America before and after the emergence of white‐nose syndrome to the situation in Europe, where the disease is endemic. We also examined the probability of local extinction for six species of hibernating bats in eastern North America and assessed the influence of winter colony size prior to the emergence of white‐nose syndrome on the risk of local extinction. RESULTS: White‐nose syndrome has caused a 10‐fold decrease in the abundance of bats at hibernacula in North America, eliminating large differences in species abundance patterns that existed between Europe and North America prior to disease emergence. White‐nose syndrome has also caused extensive local extinctions (up to 69% of sites in a single species). For five out of six species, the risk of local extinction was lower in larger winter populations, as expected from theory, but for the most affected species, the northern long‐eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis), extinction risk was constant across winter colony sizes, demonstrating that disease can sometimes eliminate numerical rarity as the dominant driver of extinction risk by driving both small and large populations extinct. MAIN CONCLUSIONS: Species interactions, including disease, play an underappreciated role in macroecological patterns and influence broad patterns of species abundance, occurrence and extinction.
Context
Developed landscapes are increasingly important movement habitat for many large carnivore populations, despite fragmentation and heightened anthropogenic risks. The availability of vegetation ...cover is a key factor mediating carnivore use of human-dominated landscapes. Restoring or modifying networks of vegetation patches may therefore provide an important tool for enhancing the connectivity value of developed areas, but requires understanding how vegetation patch networks are functionally linked by carnivore movement decisions, which occur at scales considerably finer than those typically addressed by connectivity analyses.
Objectives
We investigated the factors driving fine-scale movement decisions by pumas (
Puma concolor
) in fragmented habitats and applied our results to enhancing puma connectivity through human-dominated landscapes.
Methods
We used high-resolution data on vegetation cover and puma locations from central California to model puma habitat selection at the scale of individual movements between vegetation patches. These results informed network-based connectivity models comparing the benefits of specific wildlife corridor restoration actions (e.g., revegetation).
Results
Puma movements between vegetation patches were driven by patch size, vegetation type, and spatial arrangement relative to sources of anthropogenic risk (buildings). Pumas avoided buildings but accepted higher building densities as patch area increased or inter-patch travel distances decreased. Connectivity modeling revealed that the strategic placement of vegetation patches can substantially reduce resistance to puma movement across an otherwise high resistance developed landscape by diversifying movement options.
Conclusion
Our results reveal the factors mediating large carnivore use of human-dominated landscapes and provide a generalizable tool for increasing movement potential via the manipulation of vegetation cover.
The spatial scale at which organisms respond to human activity can affect both ecological function and conservation planning. Yet little is known regarding the spatial scale at which distinct ...behaviors related to reproduction and survival are impacted by human interference. Here we provide a novel approach to estimating the spatial scale at which a top predator, the puma (Puma concolor), responds to human development when it is moving, feeding, communicating, and denning. We find that reproductive behaviors (communication and denning) require at least a 4× larger buffer from human development than non-reproductive behaviors (movement and feeding). In addition, pumas give a wider berth to types of human development that provide a more consistent source of human interference (neighborhoods) than they do to those in which human presence is more intermittent (arterial roads with speeds >35 mph). Neighborhoods were a deterrent to pumas regardless of behavior, while arterial roads only deterred pumas when they were communicating and denning. Female pumas were less deterred by human development than males, but they showed larger variation in their responses overall. Our behaviorally explicit approach to modeling animal response to human activity can be used as a novel tool to assess habitat quality, identify wildlife corridors, and mitigate human-wildlife conflict.
The ability to quantify nature's value for tourism has significant implications for natural resource management and sustainable development policy. This is especially true in the Eastern Caribbean, ...where many countries are embracing the concept of the Blue Economy. The utilization of user-generated content (UGC) to understand tourist activities and preferences, including the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches, remains at the early stages of development and application. This work describes a new effort which has modelled and mapped multiple nature dependent sectors of the tourism industry across five small island nations. It makes broad use of UGC, while acknowledging the challenges and strengthening the approach with substantive input, correction, and modification from local experts. Our approach to measuring the nature-dependency of tourism is practical and scalable, producing data, maps and statistics of sufficient detail and veracity to support sustainable resource management, marine spatial planning, and the wider promotion of the Blue Economy framework.
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•User-generated content and local knowledge are combined to map nature dependency.•Nature shapes tourism value over a large spatial footprint in 5 Caribbean nations.•Reef-based activities drive over 8% of expenditure, over $118 million annually.•Environmental declines in beaches could lead to a loss of 17% of current visitors.•Further maps cover recreational fishing, paddle-sports, bird- and whale-watching.
Helping the world's coastal communities adapt to climate change impacts requires evaluating the vulnerability of coastal communities and assessing adaptation options. This includes understanding the ...potential for 'natural' infrastructure (ecosystems and the biodiversity that underpins them) to reduce communities' vulnerability, alongside more traditional 'hard' infrastructure approaches. Here we present a spatially explicit global evaluation of the vulnerability of coastal-dwelling human populations to key climate change exposures and explore the potential for coastal ecosystems to help people adapt to climate change (ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA)). We find that mangroves and coral reefs are particularly well situated to help people cope with current weather extremes, a function that will only increase in importance as people adapt to climate change now and in coming decades. We find that around 30.9 million people living within 2km of the coast are highly vulnerable to tropical storms and sea-level rise (SLR). Mangroves and coral reefs overlap these threats to at least 5.3 and 3.4 million people, respectively, with substantial potential to dissipate storm surges and improve resilience against SLR effects. Significant co-benefits from mangroves also accrue, with 896 million metric tons of carbon stored in their soils and above- and below-ground biomass. Our framework offers a tool for prioritizing 'hotspots' of coastal EbA potential for further, national and local analyses to quantify risk reduction and, thereby, guide investment in coastal ecosystems to help people adapt to climate change. In doing so, it underscores the global role that conserving and restoring ecosystems can play in protecting human lives and livelihoods, as well as biodiversity, in the face of climate change.
Accelerometers are useful tools for biologists seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the daily behavior of cryptic species. We describe how we used GPS and tri-axial accelerometer (sampling at ...64 Hz) collars to monitor behaviors of free-ranging pumas (Puma concolor), which are difficult or impossible to observe in the wild. We attached collars to twelve pumas in the Santa Cruz Mountains, CA from 2010-2012. By implementing Random Forest models, we classified behaviors in wild pumas based on training data from observations and measurements of captive puma behavior.
We applied these models to accelerometer data collected from wild pumas and identified mobile and non-mobile behaviors in captive animals with an accuracy rate greater than 96%. Accuracy remained above 95% even after downsampling our accelerometer data to 16 Hz. We were further able to predict low-acceleration movement behavior (e.g. walking) and high-acceleration movement behavior (e.g. running) with 93.8% and 92% accuracy, respectively. We had difficulty predicting non-movement behaviors such as feeding and grooming due to the small size of our training dataset. Lastly, we used model-predicted and field-verified predation events to quantify acceleration characteristics of puma attacks on large prey.
These results demonstrate that accelerometers are useful tools for classifying the behaviors of cryptic medium and large-sized terrestrial mammals in their natural habitats and can help scientists gain deeper insight into their fine-scale behavioral patterns. We also show how accelerometer measurements can provide novel insights on the energetics and predation behavior of wild animals. Lastly we discuss the conservation implications of identifying these behavioral patterns in free-ranging species as natural and anthropogenic landscape features influence animal energy allocation and habitat use.
Under current scenarios of climate change and habitat loss, many wild animals, especially large predators, are moving into novel energetically challenging environments. Consequently, changes in ...terrain associated with such moves may heighten energetic costs and effect the decline of populations in new localities.
To examine locomotor costs of a large carnivorous mammal moving in mountainous habitats, the oxygen consumption of captive pumas (
) was measured during treadmill locomotion on level and incline (6.8°) surfaces. These data were used to predict energetic costs of locomotor behaviours of free-ranging pumas equipped with GPS/accelerometer collars in California's Santa Cruz Mountains.
Incline walking resulted in a 42.0% ± 7.2 SEM increase in the costs of transport compared to level performance. Pumas negotiated steep terrain by traversing across hillsides (mean hill incline 17.2° ± 0.3 SEM; mean path incline 7.3° ± 0.1 SEM). Pumas also walked more slowly up steeper paths, thereby minimizing the energetic impact of vertical terrains. Estimated daily energy expenditure (DEE) based on GPS-derived speeds of free-ranging pumas was 18.3 MJ day
± 0.2 SEM. Calculations show that a 20 degree increase in mean steepness of the terrain would increase puma DEE by less than 1% as they only spend a small proportion (10%) of their day travelling. They also avoided elevated costs by utilizing slower speeds and shallower path angles.
While many factors influence survival in novel habitats, we illustrate the importance of behaviours which reduce locomotor costs when traversing new, energetically challenging environments, and demonstrate that these behaviours are utilised by pumas in the wild.
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