African wild dogs

Publications

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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Publications

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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Abrahms Lab, Updates from the Field

Field updates: Botswana, August-October 2025

Written by Dr. Kasim Rafiq and graduate student Marie-Pier Poulin of the Abrahms LabAll research and photographs are done in compliance with IACUC-approved protocols, and have been permitted through the appropriate permits. Over the past few months, we have been busy collecting data on African carnivores at Dog Camp, the Botswana-based bush camp of our long-term collaborators Wild Entrust’s Botswana

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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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Abrahms Lab, Updates from the Field

Field updates: Botswana, June – July 2025

Post written by Marie-Pier Poulin Graduate student Marie-Pier Poulin scans for animal tracking collars in the Okavango Delta. Photo credit: Leigh West In mid-June, PhD candidate Leigh West, postdoctoral researcher Dr. Kasim Rafiq, and graduate student Marie-Pier Poulin arrived at Dog Camp, the Botswana-based bush camp of our long-term collaborators Wild Entrust’s Botswana Predator Conservation. Over the past month, we

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Publications

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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Abrahms Lab, Meet CES

Meet Marie-Pier

Welcome to Meet CES, where we get to meet the people behind the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels. In this first post we are meeting one of the newest members of the team, Marie-Pier Poulin. She received her BS in Biology from the Université du Québec in Rimouski in 2019, where she tracked arctic foxes in the Canadian tundra for her

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Abrahms Lab, News

Grad student Leigh West published first article as lead author

Congratulations to Leigh West, Dr. Abrahms’s graduate student, who just recently published her first article as lead author. Her research article, “Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap,” was published in the Journal of Animal Ecology on October 4th, and also serves as the second chapter of her dissertation. This is an exciting milestone for Leigh as she

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Publications

Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap

From the Abstract:Droughts are increasing in frequency and severity globally due to climate change, leading to changes in resource availability that may have cascading effects on animal ecology. Although several studies have demonstrated the ecological impacts of drought, the behavioural responses of individuals that scale up to these broader-scale effects are not well known, particularly among animals in top trophic

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Publications

Scale at the interface of spatial and social ecology

From the abstract: “We propose three key innovations that incrementally build upon each other […] These conceptual innovations cast our understanding of the relationships between social and spatial dimensions of animal ecology in a new light, allowing a more holistic understanding and clearer hypothesis development for animal behaviour.” Authors: Simona Picardi, Briana L. Abrahms and Jerod A. MerkleJournal: Philosophical Transactions

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News

World African Wild Dog Day

Happy World African Wild Dog Day! While most people know the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels for our work on penguins, we also research African Wild Dogs. In fact, Dr. Kasim Rafiq and graduate students Leigh West and Marie-Pier Poulin are just returning from Botswana right now! As usual, they worked alongside our collaborators from Botswana Predator Conservation over the summer.

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Publications

Ecosystem Sentinels as Early-Warning Indicators in the Anthropocene

Authors: Elliott L. Hazen, Matthew S. Savoca T.J. Clark-Wolf, Max Czapanskiy, Peter M. Rabinowitz, and Briana AbrahmsJournal: Annual Review of Environment and ResourcesDOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-111522-102317 “Sentinel species, from birds to invertebrates, have been used to provide insights into ecosystem function, as leading indicators of risk to human health and as harbingers of future change, with implications for ecosystem structure and function.

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Abrahms Lab, News

WRF Symposium

Dr. Kasim Rafiq recently presented his work on using animal-worn sensors to understand the impacts of environmental change on African wild dogs and lions at the Washington Research Foundation Symposium, who fund his position at the university. As part of this work, over the past two years, Kasim, Leigh West, and Dr. Briana Abrahms developed and deployed fitness trackers for

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Abrahms Lab, News

Welcome Marie-Pier and Meredith!

The Abrahms Lab is growing! This fall we will have two new grad students join us in the Center: Meredith HonigPenguin Camp Meredith is interested in how species interactions shape ecological communities and wildlife population dynamics, especially in the implications of global climate change on these processes. She received a BS in Wildlife and Conservation Biology from the University of

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