Publications by authors named "M Hebblewhite"
Article Synopsis
- Population density is crucial for wildlife management, particularly in the Russian Far East, where methods like the FMP snow tracking are used to estimate ungulate densities and support Amur tiger conservation.
- Despite the effectiveness of FMP, reliability issues due to climate change and survey design challenges prompt the exploration of camera traps as an alternative for monitoring prey density, though their potential is still largely untested.
- A comparative study over three years found that, while both FMP and camera trap methods provided similar prey density estimates, discrepancies in prey biomass calculations highlight the need for caution in management decisions and suggest more research is necessary to improve estimation methods.
Animals within social groups respond to costs and benefits of sociality by adjusting the proportion of time they spend in close proximity to other individuals in the group (cohesion). Variation in cohesion between individuals, in turn, shapes important group-level processes such as subgroup formation and fission-fusion dynamics. Although critical to animal sociality, a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing cohesion remains a gap in our knowledge of cooperative behavior in animals.
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- Caring for newborns limits mammalian females' ability to gather resources, especially during the energy-demanding early lactation period.
- Different ungulates have developed various strategies for protecting their vulnerable newborns, from staying hidden to being mobile, which can influence their mothers' movement patterns.
- A study of 54 populations of 23 ungulate species shows that maternal movements are affected by the resource availability and type of neonatal strategy, highlighting the importance of these tactics in understanding how species adapt to environmental changes.
Competition for resources and space can drive forage selection of large herbivores from the bite through the landscape scale. Animal behaviour and foraging patterns are also influenced by abiotic and biotic factors. Fine-scale mechanisms of density-dependent foraging at the bite scale are likely consistent with density-dependent behavioural patterns observed at broader scales, but few studies have directly tested this assertion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHabitat loss is affecting many species, including the southern mountain caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) population in western North America. Over the last half century, this threatened caribou population's range and abundance have dramatically contracted. An integrated population model was used to analyze 51 years (1973-2023) of demographic data from 40 southern mountain caribou subpopulations to assess the effectiveness of population-based recovery actions at increasing population growth.
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