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112 results for “habitat dynamics”
Data for: Amazonian birds in more dynamic habitats have less population genetic structure and higher gene flow
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Data for: Dynamic coastal pelagic habitat drives rapid changes in growth and condition of juvenile sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) during early marine migration
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Satellite-based habitat monitoring reveals long-term dynamics of deer habitat in response to forest disturbances
<p class="StandardohneEinzug">Disturbances play a key role in driving forest ecosystem dynamics, but how disturbances shape wildlife habitat across space and time often remains unclear. A major reason for this is a lack of information about changes in habitat suitability across large areas and longer time periods. Here, we use a novel approach based on Landsat satellite image time series to map seasonal habitat suitability annually from 1986 to 2017. Our approach involves characterizing forest disturbance dynamics using Landsat-based metrics, harmonizing these metrics through a temporal segmentation algorithm, and then using them together with GPS telemetry data in habitat models. We apply this framework to assess how natural forest disturbances and post-disturbance salvage logging affect habitat suitability for two ungulates, roe deer (<i>Capreolus capreolus</i>) and red deer (<i>Cervus elaphus</i>), over 32 years in a Central European forest landscape. We found that red and roe deer differed in their response to forest disturbances. Habitat suitability for red deer consistently improved after disturbances, whereas the suitability of disturbed sites was more variable for roe deer depending on season (lower during winter than summer) and disturbance agent (lower in windthrow versus bark-beetle-affected stands). Salvage logging altered the suitability of bark beetle-affected stands for deer, having negative effects on red deer and mixed effects on roe deer, but generally did not have clear effects on habitat suitability in windthrows. Our results highlight long-lasting legacy effects of forest disturbances on deer habitat. For example, bark beetle disturbances improved red deer habitat suitability for at least 25 years. The duration of disturbance impacts generally increased with elevation. Methodologically, our approach proved effective for improving the robustness of habitat reconstructions from Landsat time series: integrating multi-year telemetry data into single, multi-temporal habitat models improved model transferability in time. Likewise, temporally segmenting the Landsat-based metrics increased the temporal consistency of our habitat suitability maps. As the frequency of natural forest disturbances is increasing across the globe, their impacts on wildlife habitat should be considered in wildlife and forest management. Our approach offers a widely applicable method for monitoring habitat suitability changes caused by landscape dynamics such as forest disturbance</p>
Consumer movement dynamics as hidden drivers of stream habitat structure: suckers as ecosystem engineers on the night shift
Ecosystem engineers engineering can control the spatial and temporal distribution of resources and movement by engineering organisms within an ecosystem can transport mobilize resources across boundaries and distribute engineering effects. Movement patterns of fishes can cause physical changes to stream aquatic habitats though nesting or feeding, both of which often vary in space and time. Here we present evidence of ecosystem engineering by the Sonora sucker (Catostomus insignis), a dominant fish in streams of the southwestern United States, and show how cryptic nocturnal movement patterns and bioturbation activities control heterogeneity in benthic substrates, and in sediment and carbon export. Sonora suckers exhibit distinct diel movement patterns, spending daylight hours in refuge habitats (typically deep pools) while moving into shallow habitats at night to feed. Feeding by suckers creates substantial disturbance in soft sediments that are patchy in space and time. These disturbances moved up to 2.4 × 104 cm3 of sediment per square meter per week in locations that are up to hundreds of meters away from sucker daytime refuges. The diel cycles in feeding activity (i.e., nocturnal digging in benthic substrates) caused nighttime pulses in suspended sediment that comprised up to 32% of the daily suspended load and organic matter transport of a stream reach. During the daytime, this particulate transport settles in habitats beyond the location of the initial disturbance, thus redistributing both sediment and organic matter. Our data indicate that cryptic movement by ecosystem engineers can distribute their effects in space and time generating heterogeneity in resources and suggest that habitat modifications restricting consumer movement may alter the impact of engineering activities.
Science to inform policy: linking population dynamics to habitat for a threatened species in Canada
<p>Abstract</p> <p>1. Boreal forests provide numerous ecological services, including the ability to store large amounts of carbon, and are of significance to global biodiversity. Increases in industrial activities in boreal landscapes since the mid-20th century have added to concerns over biodiversity loss and climate change. Boreal forests are home to dwindling populations of boreal caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in Canada, a species at risk that requires large, undisturbed landscapes for persistence. In 2012, the Canadian government defined critical habitat for boreal caribou by relating calf recruitment to disturbances. Some have questioned whether the recruitment-relationship can be extrapolated beyond the environmental conditions represented in the analysis.</p> <p>2. We examined the effects of human disturbances and fire (alone and in combination) on variation in recruitment and adult female survival using data from 58 study areas in Canada. Top models were used in aspatial scenarios of landscape change to evaluate the efficacy of the critical habitat definition in achieving the recovery objectives for boreal caribou in two contrasting landscapes: Little Smoky, dominated by high levels of human disturbances, and SK1, dominated by fire.</p> <p>3. The top recruitment model suggested the negative effect of fire was 3-4 times smaller than human disturbances. The top adult female survival model included human disturbances only. These results re-affirm that human disturbances are the primary factor contributing to boreal caribou declines.</p> <p>4. Our aspatial scenarios suggested that undisturbed habitat would have to increase to ≥68% for Little Smoky to maintain a self-sustaining population of boreal caribou with some degree of certainty. In contrast, the SK1 population was self-sustaining with 40% undisturbed habitat when fire disturbance predominates, but could become vulnerable with increases in human disturbances (8–9%). 5. Policy implications: Our results suggest that the 65% undisturbed critical habitat designation may serve as a reasonable proxy for achieving boreal caribou recovery in landscapes dominated by human disturbances. However, some populations may be less or more vulnerable, as illustrated by the SK1 scenarios. Continued population monitoring will be essential to assessing the effectiveness of land management strategies developed for boreal caribou recovery, especially with climate change.</p>
Fig. 2 in Dynamics of fish assemblages on a continuous rocky reef and adjacent unconsolidated habitats at Fernando de Noronha Archipelago, tropical western Atlantic
Fig. 2. Mean values (±SE) of temporal fluctuation and temporal stability.
Connectivity among thermal habitats buffers the effects of warm climate on life-history traits and population dynamics
<p>1. Contemporary climate change affects population dynamics, but its influence varies with landscape structure. It is still unclear whether landscape fragmentation buffers or enhances the effects of climate on population size and on the age and body size of individuals composing these populations.</p> <p>2. This study aims to investigate the impacts of warm climates on lizard life-history traits and population dynamics in habitats varying in their connectivity.</p> <p>3. We monitored common lizard (<em>Zootoca vivipara</em>) populations for three years in an experimental system in which both climatic conditions and connectivity among habitats were simultaneously manipulated. We considered two climatic treatments (i.e., present-day climate and warm climate (+1.4°C than present-day climate)) and two connectivity treatments (i.e., a connected treatment in which individuals could move from one climate to the other and an isolated treatment in which movement between climates was not possible). We monitored survival, reproduction, growth, dispersal, age and body size of each individual in the system as well as population density through time.</p> <p>4. We found that the influence of warm climates on the life-history traits and population dynamics depended on the connectivity among thermal habitats. Populations in warm climates were i) composed of younger individuals only when isolated; ii) larger in population size only in connected habitats; and iii) composed of larger age-specific individuals independently of the landscape configuration. The connectivity among habitats altered population responses to climate warming likely through asymmetries in the flow and phenotype of dispersers between thermal habitats.</p> <p>5. Our results demonstrate that landscape fragmentation can drastically change the dynamics and persistence of populations facing climate change.</p>
Traits mediate environmental responses of benthic ciliates in dynamic coastal habitats
<p><strong>Aim:</strong> Understanding how species' traits mediate environmental responses provides a mechanistic perspective on community assembly processes. Although traits that influence the response of multicellular organisms to environments have been studied, the identification of such traits in unicellular organisms, like ciliates, is underexplored. Since ciliates are dominate animals at coastal sandy sediments and contribute significantly to interstitial community respiration, identifying links between their occurrence and sandy-coast characteristics is crucial for conserving biodiversity and protecting coastal habitats.</p> <p><strong>Location:</strong> Coasts of China.</p> <p><strong>Methods:</strong> We used Hierarchical Modeling of Species Communities, a trait-based joint species distribution model, to analyze ciliate community data collected from 344 sites belonging to 31 beaches across the Chinese coastline.</p> <p><strong>Results:</strong> We found that physical variables play the most important role in determining ciliate occurrence. The beach index which combines the tidal range, sediment grain size and beach slope of beach selected species based on body size as well as feeding type, while sediment grain size constrained different mobility types, with swimming species favoring fine sandy sediments. The significant contribution of phylogeny in explaining the residual variation among species responses indicates that there are phylogenetically conserved but unmeasured traits too that influence species' responses. Species richness of benthic ciliates was higher in dissipative beaches with high primary productivity.</p> <p><strong>Main conclusions:</strong> Based on our research, ciliate occurrence in coastal beaches is mediated by their traits which are filtered by local environmental variables. The beach index is essential in predicting distribution patterns and species richness of benthic ciliates. Nevertheless, further research is needed to identify additional traits that will enhance the accuracy of predicting ciliate niches. Our study provides insights into the mechanisms driving ciliate community assembly processes and has implications for the conservation of biodiversity in sandy coastal habitats.</p>
Data from: Seabird presence and seasonality influence nutrient dynamics of atoll habitats
<p>In this study, we investigate nutrient dynamics linked to seabird presence and seasonality. We compare seabird colonies of different taxa nesting on separate islands of Farquhar Atoll, Seychelles. We first quantify guano nutrient input and guano nitrogen isotopes for each seabird species. We assess the transfer of seabird-derived nutrients in terrestrial and marine habitats by comparing nitrogen isotope values in soil, plants, and seagrass on each seabird island and a control island, during the wet and dry seasons. We then assess the influence of seabirds by comparing nutrient levels in soil, plants, and seagrass on each seabird island and a control island, during the wet and dry seasons. For plants and seagrass, we also assess and compare nutrient ratios and carbon stable isotope ratios on each seabird island and a control island, during the wet and dry seasons.</p>
Figure 1 in Surveillance of population dynamics and breeding habitat diversity of Anopheles subpictus in different areas of Odisha, East Central India
Figure 1. Map showing (circle marks) study areas.
Multispecies modelling reveals potential for habitat restoration to re-establish boreal vertebrate community dynamics
<p>1. The restoration of habitats degraded by industrial disturbance is essential for achieving conservation objectives in disturbed landscapes. In boreal ecosystems, disturbances from seismic exploration lines and other linear features have adversely affected biodiversity, most notably leading to declines in threatened woodland caribou. Large-scale restoration of disturbed habitats is needed, yet empirical assessments of restoration effectiveness on wildlife communities remain rare.</p> <p>2. We used 73 camera trap deployments from 2015-2019 and joint species distribution models to investigate how habitat use by the larger vertebrate community (>0.2 kg) responded to variation in key seismic line characteristics (line-of-sight, width, density and mounding) following restoration treatments in a landscape disturbed by oil and gas development in northeastern Alberta.</p> <p>3. The proportion of variation explained by line characteristics was low in comparison to habitat type and season, suggesting short-term responses to restoration treatments were relatively weak. However, we predicted that lines with characteristics consistent with restored conditions would support altered community composition, with reduced use by wolf and coyote, thereby indicating that line restoration will result in reduced contact rates between caribou and these key predators.</p> <p>4. Our analysis provides a framework to assess and predict wildlife community responses to emerging restoration efforts. With the growing importance of habitat restoration for caribou and other vertebrate species, we recommend longer-term monitoring combined with landscape-scale comparisons of different restoration approaches to more fully understand and direct these critical conservation investments. Only by combining rigorous multispecies monitoring with large-scale restoration will we effectively conserve biodiversity within rapidly changing environments.</p>
Data for: Effects of habitat management on rodent diversity, abundance, and virus infection dynamics
<p>As anthropogenic factors continue to degrade natural areas, habitat management is needed to restore and maintain biodiversity. However, the impacts of different habitat management regimes on ecosystems have largely focused on vegetation analyses, with limited evaluation of downstream effects on wildlife. We compared the effects of grassland management regimes (prescribed burning, cutting/haying, or no active management) on rodent communities and the viruses they hosted. Rodents were trapped in 13 existing grassland sites in Northwest Arkansas, USA during 2020 and 2021. Rodent blood samples were screened for antibodies against three common rodent-borne virus groups: orthohantaviruses, arenaviruses, and orthopoxviruses. We captured 616 rodents across 5953 trap nights. Burned and unmanaged sites had similarly high abundance and diversity, but burned sites had a higher proportion of grassland species than unmanaged sites; cut sites had the highest proportion of grassland species but the lowest rodent abundance and diversity. A total of 38 rodents were seropositive for one of the three virus groups (34 orthohantavirus, three arenavirus, and one orthopoxvirus). Thirty-six seropositive individuals were found in burned sites, and two orthohantavirus-seropositive individuals were found in cut sites. Cotton rats and prairie voles, two grassland species, accounted for 97% of the rodents seropositive for orthohantavirus. Our study indicates that prescribed burns lead to a diverse and abundant community of grassland rodent species when compared to other management regimes; as keystone taxa, these results also have important implications for many other species in food webs. Higher prevalence of antibodies against rodent-borne viruses in burned prairies shows an unexpected consequence likely resulting from robust host population densities supported by the increased habitat quality of these sites. Ultimately, these results provide empirical evidence that can inform grassland restoration and ongoing management strategies.</p>
Optimal prey for red fox cubs – an example of dual optimizing foraging strategy in foxes from a dynamic wetland habitat
<p>The red fox (<em>Vulpes</em> <em>vulpes</em>) is the most abundant mesopredator in the Central-European region. Detailed knowledge about their feeding behavior is important both from ecological and wildlife management reasons. Food choices of foxes are poorly predictable in high-biodiversity marshlands. The main aim of our study was to sample parallel the main food-type abundances in the study area and analyze the diet of fox cubs and cohabiting adults across three years during the period of maternal dependence of the cubs. According to the optimal foraging theory, we predicted that the cubs' diet would show higher energy content, would be more varied, and the individual prey species fed to the young would be larger. We analyzed the composition of adult fox and cub fecal samples collected separately around dens in a marshland of western Hungary, May 2014, 2017 and 2020, when the abundance values of main food sources differed. Rodents and waterfowl dominated the diet, but their relative occurrence in the samples showed yearly variations. We found that vixens follow a dual optimizing foraging strategy regarding their provisioning of the cubs and their own diet. Adult foxes optimized their diet according to the actual yearly abundances of their main food sources. Additionally, they preferred prey items that can be consumed at the site of capture (large carrion and small individual prey items). Cubs on the other hand were provisioned with optimal high-energy food, even if those in question became less abundant in that year. Vixens mostly fed to their young either larger rodents and waterfowl, or multiple small rodents at a time – these types of prey are both optimal for transportation as a single load. Providing optimal prey at an early age in a changing environment may contribute to the ecological success of the red fox.</p>
Data for: Surrounding landscape, habitat and hybridization dynamics drive population structure and genetic diversity in the Saltmarsh Sparrow (Ammospiza caudacuta)
<p class="MsoNormal">Determining factors that shape a species' population genetic structure is beneficial for identifying effective conservation practices. We assessed population structure and genetic diversity for Saltmarsh Sparrow (<em>Ammospiza caudacuta</em>), an imperiled tidal marsh specialist, using 13 microsatellite markers and 964 individuals sampled from 24 marshes across the breeding range. We show that Saltmarsh Sparrow populations are structured regionally by isolation-by-distance, with gene flow occurring among marshes within ~110-135 km of one another. Isolation-by-resistance and isolation-by-environment also shape genetic variation; several habitat and landscape features are associated with genetic diversity and genetic divergence among populations. Human development in the surrounding landscape isolates breeding marshes, reducing genetic diversity and increasing population genetic divergence, while surrounding marshland and patch habitat quality (proportion high marsh and sea-level-rise trend) have the opposite effect. The distance of the breeding marsh to the Atlantic Ocean also influences genetic variation, with marshes farther inland being more divergent than coastal marshes. In northern marshes, hybridization with Nelson's Sparrow (<em>A. nelsoni</em>) strongly influences Saltmarsh Sparrow genetic variation, by increasing genetic diversity in the population; this has a concomitant effect of increasing genetic differentiation of marshes with high levels of introgression. From a conservation perspective, we found that the majority of population clusters have low effective population sizes, suggesting a lack of resiliency. To conserve the representative breadth of genetic and ecological diversity and to ensure redundancy of populations, it will be important to protect a diversity of marsh types across the latitudinal gradient of the species range, including multiple inland, coastal and urban populations, which we have shown to exhibit signals of genetic differentiation. It will also require maintaining connectivity at a regional level, by promoting high marsh habitat at the scale of gene flow (~130 km), while also ensuring "stepping stone" populations across the range. </p>
Invasion dynamics of the European Collared-Dove are explained by combined effects of habitat and climate
<p>Global biodiversity is increasingly threatened by the spread of invasive species. Understanding the mechanisms influencing the initial colonization and persistence of invaders is therefore needed if conservation actions are to prevent new invasions or strive to slow their spread. The Eurasian collared-dove (<em>Streptopelia decaocto</em>, EUCO) is one of the most successful avian invasive species in North America; however, to our knowledge, no study has simultaneously examined the role that climate-matching, human activity, directional propagation, and local density have in this invasion process. Our research expands upon a cellular-automata-based hierarchical model developed to assess directional invasion dynamics to further quantify the impacts of climate, elevation, and land cover type on the spread of EUCO in North America. Our results suggest that EUCO's dispersal patterns can largely be explained by the effects of habitat, climate, and environmental conditions at different stages of the invasion process rather than some innate preferred north-westerly spread. Specifically, EUCO initially colonized warm and wet grassland habitats and tended to persist in urban areas. We also found that while EUCO were more likely to spread to the northeast of existing habitats, directional preference did not drive persistence and recolonization events. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating both neighbourhood effects and environmental factors in the modelling of range-expanding species, adding to the toolset available to researchers to model invasive species spread. Further, our research demonstrates that historical records of invasive species occurrences from citizen science projects can provide the data resources needed to disentangle the characteristics driving species invasion and enable predictions that are of critical importance to resource managers.</p>
Dispersal, habitat filtering, and eco-evolutionary dynamics as drivers of local and global wetland viral biogeography
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Habitat restoration weakens negative environmental effects on telomere dynamics
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Traits mediate environmental responses of benthic ciliates in dynamic coastal habitats
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Complex long-term dynamics of pollinator abundance in undisturbed Mediterranean montane habitats over two decades
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Data for: Effects of habitat management on rodent diversity, abundance, and virus infection dynamics
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These curated guides explain access requirements, typical timelines, costs, and reuse considerations for widely used research datasets.
Allen Brain Atlas
Allen Brain Atlas is an Allen Institute collection of brain map atlases, datasets, APIs, and analysis tools covering mouse, human, and non-human primate brain resources.
Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
ABODe is a University of Edinburgh DataShare dataset for behavior classification in group-housed mice using home-cage video, identities, bounding boxes, ground-plate positions, and annotator labels.
DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
DANDI is a BRAIN Initiative archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data, including electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral data packaged as NWB and related standards.
International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.