Wolf Predation on White-tailed Deer Before, During, and After a Historically Mild Winter in Northern Minnesota.

In many southern boreal ecosystems of North America, wolves are the primary predators of white-tailed deer, and white-tailed deer are the primary prey of wolves. Furthermore, wolf-deer systems have and will continue to become more common as white-tailed deer range continues expanding northward in North America. Despite this, there is little information on kill rates of wolves on deer (i.

Accurately estimating correlations between demographic parameters: A comment on Deane et al. (2023).

Estimating correlations among demographic parameters is an important method in population ecology. A recent paper by Deane et al. ( 13:e9847, 2023) attempted to explore the effects of different priors for covariance matrices on inference when using mark-recovery data.

Eat or be eaten: Implications of potential exploitative competition between wolves and humans across predator-savvy and predator-naive deer populations.

Recolonization of predators to their former ranges is becoming increasingly prevalent. Such recolonization places predators among their prey once again; the latter having lived without predation (from such predators) for a considerable time. This renewed coexistence creates opportunities to explore predation ecology at both fundamental and applied levels.

A simple, low-cost method to age mammals? An alternative to cementum annuli analysis.

One of the most common and ubiquitous methods to age mammals is by counting the cementum annuli in molars, premolars, incisors, or canines. Despite the ubiquity and perceived simplicity of the method, cementum annuli analysis can be time-consuming, expensive, inaccurate, and imprecise, and require specialized equipment. Using beavers () as a test species, we developed a straightforward method to age mammals that requires little specialized equipment.

Divergent responses of butterflies and bees to burning and grazing management in tallgrass prairies.

Butterflies and bees contribute significantly to grassland biodiversity and play important roles as pollinators and herbivores. Grassland conservation and management must be seen through the lens of insect conservation and management if these species are to thrive. In North America, grasslands are a product of climate and natural disturbances such as fire and grazing.

Social associations in common carp (): Insights from induced feeding aggregations for targeted management strategies.

Heterogeneity in social interactions can have important consequences for the spread of information and diseases and consequently conservation and invasive species management. Common carp ( are a highly social, ubiquitous, and invasive freshwater fish. Management strategies targeting foraging carp may be ideal because laboratory studies have suggested that carp can learn, have individual personalities, a unique diet, and often form large social groups.

A niche for null models in adaptive resource management.

As global systems rapidly change, our collective ability to predict future ecological dynamics will become increasingly important for successful natural resource management. By merging stakeholder objectives with system uncertainty, and by adapting actions to changing systems and knowledge, adaptive resource management (ARM) provides a rigorous platform for making sound decisions in a changing world. Critically, however, applications of ARM could be improved by employing benchmarks (i.

Animal movement tools (amt): R package for managing tracking data and conducting habitat selection analyses.

Advances in tracking technology have led to an exponential increase in animal location data, greatly enhancing our ability to address interesting questions in movement ecology, but also presenting new challenges related to data management and analysis. Step-selection functions (SSFs) are commonly used to link environmental covariates to animal location data collected at fine temporal resolution. SSFs are estimated by comparing observed steps connecting successive animal locations to random steps, using a likelihood equivalent of a Cox proportional hazards model.

Using ring-recovery and within-season recapture data to estimate fecundity and population growth.

Tag-recovery data from organisms captured and marked post breeding are commonly used to estimate juvenile and adult survival. If annual fecundity could also be estimated, tagging studies such as European and North American bird-ringing schemes could provide all parameters needed to estimate population growth. I modified existing tag-recovery models to allow estimation of annual fecundity using age composition and recapture probabilities obtained during routine banding operations of northern pintails () and dark-eyed juncos (), and I conducted simulations to assess estimator performance in relation to sample size.

Moose movement rates are altered by wolf presence in two ecosystems.

Predators directly impact prey populations through lethal encounters, but understanding nonlethal, indirect effects is also critical because foraging animals often face trade-offs between predator avoidance and energy intake. Quantifying these indirect effects can be difficult even when it is possible to monitor individuals that regularly interact. Our goal was to understand how movement and resource selection of a predator (wolves; ) influence the movement behavior of a prey species (moose; ).

Cracking the case: Seed traits and phylogeny predict time to germination in prairie restoration species.

Traits are important for understanding how plant communities assemble and function, providing a common currency for studying ecological processes across species, locations, and habitat types. However, the majority of studies relating species traits to community assembly rely upon vegetative traits of mature plants. Seed traits, which are understudied relative to whole-plant traits, are key to understanding assembly of plant communities.

What explains patterns of species richness? The relative importance of climatic-niche evolution, morphological evolution, and ecological limits in salamanders.

A major goal of evolutionary biology and ecology is to understand why species richness varies among clades. Previous studies have suggested that variation in richness among clades might be related to variation in rates of morphological evolution among clades (e.g.