Associations between glucocorticoids and habitat selection reflect daily and seasonal energy requirements.

Background: Glucocorticoids are often associated with stressful environments, but they are also thought to drive the best strategies to improve fitness in stressful environments. Glucocorticoids improve fitness in part by regulating foraging behaviours in response to daily and seasonal energy requirements. However, many studies demonstrating relationships between foraging behaviour and glucocorticoids are experimental, and few observational studies conducted under natural conditions have tested whether changing glucocorticoid levels are related to daily and seasonal changes in energy requirements.

Meta-analysis reveals between-population differences affect the link between glucocorticoids and population health.

Glucocorticoids are a popular tool for monitoring health of animal populations because they can increase with environmental stressors and can indicate chronic stress. However, individual responses to stressors create variation in the glucocorticoid-fitness relationship within populations. The inconsistency in this relationship calls into question the widespread use of glucocorticoids in conservation.

Bibliometric investigation of the integration of animal personality in conservation contexts.

Consistent individual differences in behavior, commonly termed animal personality, are a widespread phenomenon across taxa that have important consequences for fitness, natural selection, and trophic interactions. Animal personality research may prove useful in several conservation contexts, but which contexts remains to be determined. We conducted a structured literature review of 654 studies identified by combining search terms for animal personality and various conservation subfields.

Individual differences in habitat selection mediate landscape level predictions of a functional response.

Predicting future space use by animals requires models that consider both habitat availability and individual differences in habitat selection. The functional response in habitat selection posits animals adjust their habitat selection to availability, but population-level responses to availability may differ from individual responses. Generalized functional response (GFR) models account for functional responses by including fixed effect interactions between habitat availability and selection.

Burrowing Richardson's ground squirrels affect plant seedling assemblages via environmental but not seed bank changes.

In grassland ecosystems, burrowing mammals create disturbances, providing habitat for animal species and increasing plant community diversity. We investigated whether seedling assemblages on Richardson's ground squirrel mounds result from seed rearrangement or environmental changes that favor germination of certain species over others. To test whether ground squirrels rearrange the seed bank by burrowing, we compared seed compositions among mounds, burrows, and undisturbed soil.