Publications by authors named "W Vickers"

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is increasing in extent and intensity across the globe. It has been shown to interfere with animal sensory systems, orientation and distribution, with the potential to cause significant ecological impacts. We analysed the locations of 102 mountain lions () in a light-polluted region in California.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Small effective population sizes raise the probability of extinction by increasing the frequency of potentially deleterious alleles and reducing fitness. However, the extent to which cancers play a role in the fitness reduction of genetically depauperate wildlife populations is unknown. Santa Catalina island foxes () sampled in 2007-2008 have a high prevalence of ceruminous gland tumors, which was not detected in the population prior to a recent bottleneck caused by a canine distemper epidemic.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper proposes a robust system for detecting North Atlantic right whales by using deep learning methods to denoise noisy recordings. Passive acoustic recordings of right whale vocalisations are subject to noise contamination from many sources, such as shipping and offshore activities. When such data are applied to uncompensated classifiers, accuracy falls substantially.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Determining parameters that govern pathogen transmission (such as the force of infection, FOI), and pathogen impacts on morbidity and mortality, is exceptionally challenging for wildlife. Vital parameters can vary, for example across host populations, between sexes and within an individual's lifetime.Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) is a lentivirus affecting domestic and wild cat species, forming species-specific viral-host associations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Feline foamy virus (FFV) is a retrovirus that has been detected in multiple feline species, including domestic cats () and pumas (). FFV results in persistent infection but is generally thought to be apathogenic. Sero-prevalence in domestic cat populations has been documented in several countries, but the extent of viral infections in nondomestic felids has not been reported.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF