Gyrfalcon Prey Abundance and Their Habitat Associations in a Changing Arctic.

Arctic habitats are changing rapidly and altering trophic webs and ecosystem functioning. Understanding how species' abundances and distributions differ among Arctic habitats is important in predicting future species shifts and trophic-web consequences. We aimed to determine the habitat-abundance relationships for three small herbivores on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska, USA by fitting data from 983 point counts (collected during 2019, 2021, and 2022) with N-mixture models that account for imperfect detection.

Long-term, large-scale experiment reveals the effects of seed limitation, climate, and anthropogenic disturbance on restoration of plant communities in a biodiversity hotspot.

Ecological restoration is essential for maintaining biodiversity in the face of dynamic, global changes in climate, human land use, and disturbance regimes. Effective restoration requires understanding bottlenecks in plant community recovery that exist today, while recognizing that these bottlenecks may relate to complex histories of environmental change. Such understanding has been a challenge because few long-term, well-replicated experiments exist to decipher the demographic processes influencing recovery for numerous species against the backdrop of multiyear variation in climate and management.

Personality differences in the selection of dynamic refugia have demographic consequences for a winter-adapted bird.

For overwintering species, individuals' ability to find refugia from inclement weather and predators probably confers strong fitness benefits. How animals use their environment can be mediated by their personality (e.g.

Top-down effects of repatriating bald eagles hinder jointly recovering competitors.

The recovery of piscivorous birds around the world is touted as one of the great conservation successes of the 21st century, but for some species, this success was short-lived. Bald eagles, ospreys and great blue herons began repatriating Voyageurs National Park, USA, in the mid-20th century. However, after 1990, only eagles continued their recovery, while osprey and heron recovery failed for unknown reasons.

Prey abundance and urbanization influence the establishment of avian predators in a metropolitan landscape.

Urbanization causes the simplification of natural habitats, resulting in animal communities dominated by exotic species with few top predators. In recent years, however, many predators such as hawks, and in the US coyotes and cougars, have become increasingly common in urban environments. Hawks in the genus, especially, are recovering from widespread population declines and are increasingly common in urbanizing landscapes.

How Decision Support Systems Can Benefit from a Theory of Change Approach.

Decision support systems are now mostly computer and internet-based information systems designed to support land managers with complex decision-making. However, there is concern that many environmental and agricultural decision support systems remain underutilized and ineffective. Recent efforts to improve decision support systems use have focused on enhancing stakeholder participation in their development, but a mismatch between stakeholders' expectations and the reality of decision support systems outputs continues to limit uptake.

Modelling landscape-level numerical responses of predators to prey: the case of cats and rabbits.

Predator-prey systems can extend over large geographical areas but empirical modelling of predator-prey dynamics has been largely limited to localised scales. This is due partly to difficulties in estimating predator and prey abundances over large areas. Collection of data at suitably large scales has been a major problem in previous studies of European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and their predators.

Grain, pellet and wax block bait take by the house mouse (Mus musculus) and non-target species: implications for mouse eradications on coral cay islands.

Introduced rodents have been eradicated from large numbers of offshore islands using toxic baits; however, toxic baits have been linked with negative impacts on non-target species. The present study assessed the bait take of target (house mouse, Mus musculus) and non-target (buff banded rail, Rallus philippensis) animals on Northwest and Heron Islands in the Great Barrier Reef. Three non-toxic bait formulations (wax block, pellet and grain) were tested and each was applied at 1 kg ha(-1) in six treatment grids.