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Warming temperatures increase close encounters between two top predator species

Full Title: Warming temperatures increase close encounters between two top predator species via changes in spatial behaviour Animals need to adjust to changing environments to survive, and these changes can affect whole populations and ecosystems. However, it’s not well understood how climate-driven changes in behavior influence interactions between different top predators. To study this, researchers looked at large African predators, […]

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Publications

Local and Landscape-Level Environmental Conditions Drive Habitat Selection Across Terrestrial Mammal Species

Abbreviated abstract: Animal movements are a fundamental process affecting communities and ecosystems. Quantifying habitat selection across species and habitats is key for understanding how animals respond to environmental change. Currently, we lack comparative studies that examine how habitat selection varies across species traits and landscapes. We aim to quantify global patterns of habitat selection to help understand the fundamental drivers

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A photo of a blue whale surfacing in the open ocean, taken from above.Publications

Resource variability shapes the ecology of social information and collective sensing

Paper highlights: Social information enables organisms, from whales to bacteria, to expand their sensory capacity beyond that of a single individual. Understanding why such collective sensing evolves requires evaluating the ecological costs and benefits of using and producing social information. The value of social information for an individual consumer depends on how the resource varies in space, time, and abundance.

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Leveraging machine learning and accelerometry to classify animal behaviors with uncertainty

Animal-worn sensors, especially accelerometers, are increasingly used with machine-learning models to identify animal behaviors. These tools often struggle with uneven training data, uncertain predictions, and noisy results. To address these issues, Dr. Rafiq and Dr. Abrahms, with their collaborators, developed an open-source method that combines machine learning and statistical techniques to improve behavior classification and to provide “prediction sets,” which

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Loggerhead turtles killed as result of shrimp bycatch prior to introduction ofturtle excluder devices.Publications

Vulnerability of marine megafauna to global at-sea anthropogenic threats

Marine megafauna face many human-caused threats, so understanding how vulnerable each species is to these dangers is essential. In this study, researchers assessed how 256 large marine species respond to 23 different threats, ranging from specific fishing gear to climate impacts and coastal disturbances. They found that 70 species had high vulnerability (v > 0.778 out of 1) to at

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A mother gray whale and calf spy-hopping.Publications

What gray whales are telling us about ecosystem change in the Pacific Arctic

Gray whales in the eastern North Pacific have been shrinking in number for the past six years — and the decline seems to be getting worse. This is surprising because gray whales had made a big comeback after being hunted almost to extinction. But now, warming oceans are changing their Arctic feeding areas. Less sea ice and shifts in ocean

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An African wild dog looks towards the camera through green leaves.Publications

Wild canids and felids differ in their reliance on reused travel routeways

Dr. Briana Abrahms and Dr. Kasim Rafiq, along with many collaborators, published this study in PNAS earlier this fall. Animals move through their environments in many different ways, and these movement patterns affect things like hunting, finding mates, and spreading diseases. This study looked at GPS data from over 1,200 wild carnivores—16 canid (dog-like) and 18 felid (cat-like) species from

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A wet Magellanic chick stands in a flooded burrow.Publications

Interacting climatic and biotic drivers of population responses to climate change

Full title: Comparative life-cycle analyses reveal interacting climatic and biotic drivers of population responses to climate change Dr. Briana Abrahms and Dr. Dee Boersma collaborated on this study, published in PNAS Nexus in September. The study looked at long-term data from 41 plant and animal species to understand how climate change and other factors together affect survival and reproduction. The

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Publications

Perceived and observed biases within scientific communities

Full title: Perceived and observed biases within scientific communities: a case study in movement ecology From the abstract: “Although the survey indicated most conference participants as bias-aware, conversations only covered a subset of biases. We discuss potential causes of bias (parachute-science, fieldwork accessibility), solutions and the need to evaluate mitigatory action effectiveness. Undertaking data-driven analysis of bias within sub-disciplines can

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A humpback whale breaching in a graceful arc.Publications

Identifying climate refugia and bright spots for highly mobile species

From the abstract: “We present a framework to facilitate climate change adaptation planning by identifying where highly migratory species habitats will persist (climate refugia), emerge (bright spots), disappear (dark spots), or remain unsuitable based on model analysis by 2100. When applied to eight species in the California Current System, we found that, on average, 37% of habitats are expected to

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Intraguild competition mediates human avoidance in an endangered African large carnivore

Excerpt from the abstract: Here, we examined the spatial behaviour of two sympatric large carnivore species exhibiting intense intraguild competition—lions and African wild dogs—to investigate whether intraguild competition mediates large carnivore responses to human disturbance in support of the anthropogenic refuge hypothesis. We found that lions consistently avoided human-dominated areas. Similarly, we found that wild dogs generally avoided human-dominated areas,

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Humpback whale breachingPublications

Culture and conservation in baleen whales

From the abstract: Here, as part of the UNEP CMS Expert Group on Animal Culture and Social Complexity, we first evaluate key evidence for social learning and culture in baleen whales through several case studies. We then suggest key indicators by behavioural context to assist in identifying potential cases of social learning in more elusive species generating a practical guide

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Publications

Strategic planning could reduce farm-scale mariculture impacts on marine biodiversity while expanding seafood production

From the abstract:“Here we estimate local cumulative environmental impacts from current and future (2050) mariculture production on marine biodiversity (20,013 marine fauna), while accounting for species range shifts under climate change. […] Our results reveal where and how much mariculture impacts could change in the coming decades and identify pathways for countries to minimize risks under expansion of mariculture and

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Generative AI as a tool to accelerate the field of ecology

This paper summarizes the potential generative artificial intelligence (AI) has to aid ecological research. With access to more and more data, like genetic information and animal movement data, generative AI could augment data-scarce datasets, extend observations of ecological patterns, and increase the accessibility of ecological data. The paper also covers the challenges to using generative AI such as privacy concerns,

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Plasticity syndromes in wild vertebrates: Patterns and consequences of individual variation in plasticity across multiple behaviours

Animals can change their behavior to survive in environments that are constantly changing, a skill known as behavioral plasticity. Scientists have suggested that some animals might show “plasticity syndromes,” meaning they are flexible in many behaviors at the same time. Plasticity syndromes in wild vertebrates could help them respond better to change. To test this idea, researchers studied Magellanic penguins

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