Within the context of global change, seed dispersal research often focuses on changes in disperser communities (i.e., seed dispersers, such as birds, in an area) resulting from habitat fragmentation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWild pigs () are invading many areas globally and impacting biodiversity and economies in their non-native range. Thus, wild pigs are often targeted for eradication efforts. Age- and sex-specific body measurements are important for informing these eradication efforts because they reflect body condition, resource availability, and fecundity, which are common indicators of population trajectory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConceptual gaps and imprecise terms and definitions may obscure the breadth of plant-animal dispersal relationships involved in directed dispersal. The term 'directed' indicates predictable delivery to favourable microsites. However, directed dispersal was initially considered uncommon in diffuse mutualisms (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFManaging wildlife populations in the face of global change requires regular data on the abundance and distribution of wild animals, but acquiring these over appropriate spatial scales in a sustainable way has proven challenging. Here we present the data from Snapshot USA 2020, a second annual national mammal survey of the USA. This project involved 152 scientists setting camera traps in a standardized protocol at 1485 locations across 103 arrays in 43 states for a total of 52,710 trap-nights of survey effort.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBecause ungulates are important contributors to ecosystem function, understanding the "ecology of fear" could be important to the conservation of ecosystems. Although studying ungulate ecology of fear is common, knowledge from ungulate systems is highly contested among ecologists. Here, we review the available literature on the ecology of fear in ungulates to generalize our current knowledge and how we can leverage it for conservation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmental management often requires making decisions despite system uncertainty. One such example is mudflat mediation in flood control reservoirs. Reservoir mudflats limit development of diverse fish assemblages due to the lack of structural habitat provided by plants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTraditional forms of higher learning include teaching in the classroom on college campuses and in-person adult-focused public outreach events for non-students. Online college degree programs and public outreach platforms have been steadily emerging, and the COVID-19 pandemic has, at least temporarily, forced all related ecology and evolutionary biology programs to move to online delivery. Podcasting is a form of online mass communication that is rapidly gaining popularity and has the flexibility to be incorporated into the pedagogical toolbox for the online classroom and remote public outreach programming.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14-week period (17 August-24 November of 2019).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic introduced an abrupt change in human behavior globally. Here, we discuss unique insights the pandemic has provided into the eco-evolutionary role of pathogens in ecosystems and present data that indicates the pandemic may have fundamentally changed our learning choices. COVID-19 has indirectly affected many organisms and processes by changing the behavior of humans to avoid being infected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHerbivores must navigate a heterogeneous matrix of nutrients in plant communities to meet physiological requirements. Given that the only difference between an essential nutrient and a toxin is the concentration in the herbivores diet, heterogeneity of nutrient concentrations in plant communities likely force wild herbivores to balance intake of abundant nutrients that may reach toxic levels with the need to meet nutritional demands of rare nutrients (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiological invasions often have contrasting consequences with reports of invasions decreasing diversity at small scales and facilitating diversity at large scales. Thus, previous literature has concluded that invasions have a fundamental spatial scale-dependent relationship with diversity. Whether the scale-dependent effects apply to vertebrate invaders is questionable because studies consistently report that vertebrate invasions produce different outcomes than plant or invertebrate invasions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWeather has been recognized as a density independent factor influencing the abundance, distribution, and behavior of vertebrates. Male wild turkeys' (Meleagris gallopavo) breeding behavior includes vocalizations and courtship displays to attract females, the phenology of which can vary with latitude. State biologists design spring turkey-hunting season frameworks centered on annual vocalization patterns to maximize hunter engagement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnthropogenic sound is increasingly considered a major environmental issue, but its effects are relatively unstudied. Organisms may be directly affected by anthropogenic sound in many ways, including interference with their ability to detect mates, predators, or food, and disturbances that directly affect one organism may in turn have indirect effects on others. Thus, to fully appreciate the net effect of anthropogenic sound, it may be important to consider both direct and indirect effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGiving-up density (GUD) experiments have been a foundational method to evaluate perceived predation risk, but rely on the assumption that food preferences are absolute, so that areas with higher GUDs can be interpreted as having higher risk. However, nutritional preferences are context dependent and can change with risk. We used spiders and grasshoppers to test the hypothesis that covariance in nutritional preferences and risk may confound the interpretation of GUD experiments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCamera traps and radiotags commonly are used to estimate animal activity curves. However, little empirical evidence has been provided to validate whether they produce similar results. We compared activity curves from two common camera trapping techniques to those from radiotags with four species that varied substantially in size (~1 kg-~50 kg), diet (herbivore, omnivore, carnivore), and mode of activity (diurnal and crepuscular).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn evolutionary trap occurs when an organism makes a formerly adaptive decision that now results in a maladaptive outcome. Such traps can be induced by anthropogenic environmental changes, with nonnative species introductions being a leading cause. The recent establishment of coyotes () into the southeastern USA has the potential to change white-tailed deer () population dynamics through direct predation and behavioral adaptation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScale is important in understanding and applying concepts in ecology. Historically, the mechanisms regulating necrophagous arthropod community structure have been well explored on a single vertebrate carcass. However, practically nothing is known of whether such findings can be extrapolated to cases where large numbers of carcasses have been introduced into an ecosystem at a single time point.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNearly all species of sexually dimorphic ungulates sexually segregate. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, including the social-factors hypothesis (SFH) and the predation hypothesis (PH). Interestingly, previous studies have accepted and rejected each hypothesis within and across species but few studies have simultaneously tested both hypotheses in the same population.
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