Animal Species Recognition with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks from Ecological Camera Trap Images.

Accurate identification of animal species is necessary to understand biodiversity richness, monitor endangered species, and study the impact of climate change on species distribution within a specific region. Camera traps represent a passive monitoring technique that generates millions of ecological images. The vast numbers of images drive automated ecological analysis as essential, given that manual assessment of large datasets is laborious, time-consuming, and expensive.

Biogeographic consequences of shifting climate for the western massasauga ().

The western massasauga () is a small pit viper with an extensive geographic range, yet observations of this species are relatively rare. They persist in patchy and isolated populations, threatened by habitat destruction and fragmentation, mortality from vehicle collisions, and deliberate extermination. Changing climates may pose an additional stressor on the survival of isolated populations.

Phylogeographic structure of the dunes sagebrush lizard, an endemic habitat specialist.

Phylogeographic divergence and population genetic diversity within species reflect the impacts of habitat connectivity, demographics, and landscape level processes in both the recent and distant past. Characterizing patterns of differentiation across the geographic range of a species provides insight on the roles of organismal and environmental traits in evolutionary divergence and future population persistence. This is particularly true of habitat specialists where habitat availability and resource dependence may result in pronounced genetic structure as well as increased population vulnerability.

Phylogenetic structure of Holbrookia lacerata (Cope 1880) (Squamata: Phrynosomatidae): one species or two?

Species delimitation attempts to match species-level taxonomy with actual evolutionary lineages. Such taxonomic conclusions are typically, but not always, based on patterns of congruence across multiple data sources and methods of analyses. Here, we use this pluralistic approach to species delimitation to help resolve uncertainty in species boundaries of phrynosomatid sand lizards of the genus Holbrookia.

An Improved Approach for Forecasting Ecological Impacts from Future Drilling in Unconventional Shale Oil and Gas Plays.

Directional well drilling and hydraulic fracturing has enabled energy production from previously inaccessible resources, but caused vegetation conversion and landscape fragmentation, often in relatively undisturbed habitats. We improve forecasts of future ecological impacts from unconventional oil and gas play developments using a new, more spatially-explicit approach. We applied an energy production outlook model, which used geologic and economic data from thousands of wells and three oil price scenarios, to map future drilling patterns and evaluate the spatial distribution of vegetation conversion and habitat impacts.

Comparison of Recent Oil and Gas, Wind Energy, and Other Anthropogenic Landscape Alteration Factors in Texas Through 2014.

Recent research assessed how hydrocarbon and wind energy expansion has altered the North American landscape. Less understood, however, is how this energy development compares to other anthropogenic land use changes. Texas leads U.

Resident-invader phylogenetic relatedness, not resident phylogenetic diversity, controls community invasibility.

A central goal of invasion biology is to elucidate mechanisms regulating community invasibility. Darwin's naturalization hypothesis, one of the oldest hypotheses in invasion biology, emphasizes the importance of phylogenetic relatedness (PR) between resident and invader species for predicting invasibility. Alternatively, a recent extension of the diversity-invasibility hypothesis predicts that phylogenetic diversity (PD) of resident communities influences invasibility.

Linking irreplaceable landforms in a self-organizing landscape to sensitivity of population vital rates for an ecological specialist.

Irreplaceable, self-organizing landforms and the endemic and ecologically specialized biodiversity they support are threatened globally by anthropogenic disturbances. Although the outcome of disrupting landforms is somewhat understood, little information exists that documents population consequences of landform disturbance on endemic biodiversity. Conservation strategies for species dependent upon landforms have been difficult to devise because they require understanding complex feedbacks that create and maintain landforms and the consequences of landform configuration on demography of species.

Landscape pattern determines neighborhood size and structure within a lizard population.

Although defining population structure according to discrete habitat patches is convenient for metapopulation theories, taking this approach may overlook structure within populations continuously distributed across landscapes. For example, landscape features within habitat patches direct the movement of organisms and define the density distribution of individuals, which can generate spatial structure and localized dynamics within populations as well as among them. Here, we use the neighborhood concept, which describes population structure relative to the scale of individual movements, to illustrate how localized dynamics within a population of lizards (Sceloporus arenicolus) arise in response to variation in landscape pattern within a continuous habitat patch.

Species phylogenetic relatedness, priority effects, and ecosystem functioning.

Species immigration history can structure ecological communities through priority effects, which are often mediated by competition. As competition tends to be stronger between species with more similar niches, we hypothesize that species phylogenetic relatedness, under niche conservatism, may be a reasonable surrogate of niche similarity between species, and thus influence the strength of priority effects. We tested this hypothesis using a laboratory microcosm experiment in which we established bacterial species pools with different levels of phylogenetic relatedness and manipulated the immigration history of species from each pool into microcosms.

Predators temper the relative importance of stochastic processes in the assembly of prey metacommunities.

Communities assemble through a combination of stochastic processes, which can make environmentally similar communities divergent (high beta-diversity), and deterministic processes, which can make environmentally similar communities convergent (low beta-diversity). Top predators can influence both stochasticity (e.g.

Ecological correlates of risk and incidence of West Nile virus in the United States.

West Nile virus, which was recently introduced to North America, is a mosquito-borne pathogen that infects a wide range of vertebrate hosts, including humans. Several species of birds appear to be the primary reservoir hosts, whereas other bird species, as well as other vertebrate species, can be infected but are less competent reservoirs. One hypothesis regarding the transmission dynamics of West Nile virus suggests that high bird diversity reduces West Nile virus transmission because mosquito blood-meals are distributed across a wide range of bird species, many of which have low reservoir competence.

Predator-dependent species-area relationships.

In addition to having a positive effect on species richness (species-area relationships [SARs]), habitat area can influence the presence of predators, which can indirectly influence prey richness. While these direct and indirect effects of area on richness occur simultaneously, no research has examined how predation might contribute to SAR variation. We extend MacArthur and Wilson's equilibrium theory of island biogeography by including predation-induced shifts in prey extinction and predict that predators will reduce slopes of prey SARs.

Genetic relationships of American alligator populations distributed across different ecological and geographic scales.

Although much work has been conducted on coastal populations of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), less is known about the population dynamics and genetic structure of populations of alligators confined to inland habitats. DNA microsatellite loci, derived from the American alligator, were used to investigate patterns of genetic variation within and between populations of alligators distributed at coastal and inland localities in Texas. These data were used to evaluate the genetic discreteness of different alligator stocks relative to their basic ecology at these sites.