Treesearch

1. While collaborative science is becoming the norm in ecology, many ecologists participating in collaborations are less aware of the body of research that studies the processes by which collaborative teams organize and communicate.2. Here, we discuss how we successfully used a shared leadership model in the Dry Rivers Research Coordination Network. We discuss how this model promoted our success in different stages of the project, using the Tuckman model of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.3. Shared leadership in the forming phase helped us recruit a...

Wolverine (Gulo gulo) and Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), listed as threatened under the United States Endangered Species Act, inhabit remote mountainous terrain across multiple western states. To address challenges associated with collecting long-term occupancy and demographic data for both species, we developed and tested a modified non-invasive camera and hair snag (C&H) monitoring system for simultaneous long-term monitoring of wolverine and Canada lynx (lynx hereafter). We aimed to adapt wolverine monitoring for concurrent use with lynx; redesign the data collection framework and...

Understanding wildlife responses to human disturbance is essential for developing effective conservation and management strategies. Grizzly bears in the southern Canadian Rocky Mountains face increasing habitat alteration from roads, forest harvest, human settlements, and mining, which can alter the way animals move through the landscape. Deleterious effects on genetic exchange, demographic connectivity, and access to key resources can occur if movements are dramatically altered. We used integrated step-selection functions (iSSF) to model movement and habitat selection for 109 GPS-collared...

Comprehensive monitoring of biodiversity to direct conservation action is foundational to addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. As integrative monitoring programs increasingly come online in response to multilateral biodiversity agreements, establishing best practices for optimal design is critical. Appropriately selecting monitoring locations is fundamental for producing robust biodiversity data. Despite extensive development of algorithms to systematically select sites, practical discussions of which algorithm is optimal for different monitoring settings is largely absent from the...

Successive catastrophic wildfire seasons in western North America have escalated the urgency around reducing fire risk to communities and ecosystems. In historically frequent-fire forests, fuel buildup as a result of fire exclusion is contributing to increased fire severity. The probability of high-severity fire can be reduced by active forest management that reduces fuels, prompting federal and state agencies to commit significant resources to increase the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatments. However, lower severity areas of wildfires also have the potential to act as “treatments,”...

Forests provide critical ecological and economic services in Bhutan. After reports of a heavy adelgid infestation damaging trees in a forest nursery in Changaphu in 2019, a country-wide survey was conducted between 2020 and 2022. Eight adelgid species were found. Four were described elsewhere before this survey: Adelges (Annandina) tsugae Annand, Ad. (Gilletteela) glandulae, Pineus (Pineus) armandicola Zhang, Zhong and Zhang, and P. (P.) wallichianae Yaseen and Ghani. The remaining 4 were new species described in a separate paper: Ad. (Cholodkovskya) changaphuensis Havill and Brunet, Ad....

Critically burnt slopes are treated after a wildfire to reduce erosion and the impacts of eroded soil and ash on downstream water quality. Conventional post-wildfire erosion mitigation methods including mulch, barrier, and seeding treatments have some drawbacks that may result in low efficiency. Polymeric materials, xanthan gum (XG) and polyacrylamide (PAM), are shown to be effective alternatives to the conventional methods in controlling post-wildfire erosion of bare soil. This study evaluates the use of XG and PAM for controlling post-wildfire erosion when the soil surface is covered...

Although half of Earth’s population resides in the wildland-urban interface, human exposure to wildland fires remains unquantified. We show that the population directly exposed to wildland fires increased 40% globally from 2002 to 2021 despite a 26% decline in burned area. Increased exposure was mainly driven by enhanced colocation of wildland fires and human settlements, doubling the exposure per unit burned area. We show that population dynamics accounted for 25% of the 440 million human exposures to wildland fires. Although wildfire disasters in North America, Europe, and Oceania have...

Passive acoustic monitoring is an emerging approach in wildlife research that leverages recent improvements in purpose-made automated recording units (ARUs). The general approach is to deploy ARUs in the field to record on a programmed schedule for extended periods (weeks or months), after which the audio data are retrieved. These data must then be processed, typically either by measuring or analyzing characteristics of the audio itself (e.g. calculating acoustic indices), or by searching for some signal of interest within the recordings, e.g. vocalizations or other sounds produced by some...