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1,013 results for “Wildlife”
Effects of Altered Precipitation on Biological Soil Crusts, Fungi, and Soil Nitrogen Availability at the Monsoon Rainfall Manipulation Experiment (MRME) in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico (2016)
Microbial activity in drylands is mediated by the magnitude and frequency of growing season rain events that will shift as climate change progresses. Nitrogen is often co-limiting with water availability to dryland plants, and thus we investigated how microbes important to the nitrogen (N) cycle and soil N availability varied temporally and spatially in the context of a long-term rainfall variability experiment in the northern Chihuahuan Desert. Specifically, we assessed biological soil crust (biocrust) chlorophyll content, fungal abundance, and inorganic N in soils adjacent to individuals of the grassland foundation species, Bouteloua eriopoda, and in the unvegetated interspace at multiple time points associated with an experimental monsoon rain treatment. Treatments included small weekly (5 mm) or large monthly (20 mm) rain events, which had been applied during the summer monsoon for nine years prior to our sampling. Additionally, we evaluated target plant C:N ratios and added 15 N-glutamate to biocrusts to determine potential for nutrient transport to B. eriopoda. Biocrust chlorophyll was up to 67% higher in the small weekly or large monthly rainfall regimes compared to ambient controls. Fungal biomass was 57% lower in soil interspaces than adjacent to plants but did not respond to rainfall regime treatments. Ammonium and nitrate concentrations near plants declined through the sampling period but varied little in soil interspaces. There was limited movement of 15 N from interspace biocrusts to leaves but high 15 N retention in the soils even after additional ambient and experimental rain events. Plant C:N ratio was unaffected by rainfall treatments. The long-term alteration in rainfall regime in this experiment did not change how short-term microbial abundance or N availability responded to the magnitude or frequency of events, suggesting a limited response of N availability to future climate change.
Bowen Ratio Evapotranspiration Data at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, 1996-1999
This file contains data collected from 1996-1999 at a Bowen ratio tower adjacent to the Deep Well Meteorological Station at Deep Well (Station 40). The Bowen ratio method employs a method of measuring the temperature and vapor pressure gradient over a vegetation canopy to quantify evapotranspiration from that canopy.
Water Balance Modeling Project at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico: Vegetation Plot Data (1995-1998)
The water balance vegetation plots were part of a larger water balance monitoring project at the Sevilleta LTER. The plots were designed to measure the percent cover of photosynthetic/transpiring (green) plant species at specific sites where time domain reflectometry (TDR) probes and weather stations were already installed. In 1995, there were three sites (Field Station, Deep Well and Rio Salado). A 30m x 30m plot was installed at each site, and collection of vegetation data commenced in July 1995. Percent cover (green) and species identities were recorded monthly at a representative sample of 1m square quadrats within each plot.
Mesocosm (Marsh Organ) experiment at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, MD, 2012
This experiment examines the effects of tidal inundation on the growth of salt marsh vegetation. We measured the response of plants to disturbance across a gradient in inundation times by transplanting tussocks of Schoenoplectus americanus into mesocosms of different elevation. The mesocosms were arranged into structures commonly described as �marsh organs�. Here we utilize two marsh organs each containing 54 mesocosms constructed of 6-inch diameter (0.0182, m2) polyvinyl chloride pipe, arranged into nine rows containing six pipes of identical elevation. We conducted the experiment in a large brackish marsh on the Atlantic Coast of North America. The study site is adjacent to the Blackwater River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay (Maryland, USA) (Blackwater, 38.40�N, 76.07�W). Changes in water level are primarily driven by meteorological events, with mean astronomical tides of <0.25 m. Long-term porewater salinities average 10 p.p.t. within the marsh soil, and intertidal vegetation is dominated by Schoenoplectus americanus and Spartina patens.
Image 4. A in Status and conservation of crocodiles in the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, eastern Nepal
Image 4. A - Movement of the livestock along the shoreline; B - People came to collect the firewood; C - Human activities along the bank of the edge of the river; D - Low level of water in the Tetriganchital in summer
Image 3. A & B in Status and conservation of crocodiles in the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, eastern Nepal
Image 3. A & B - The mugger using the same basking platform; C - An adult mugger crawling on the sand bank; D - A mark due to its crawl; E & F - "U" shaped marks due to its crawl
Data from: Assessing the contributions of intraspecific and environmental sources of infection in urban wildlife: Salmonella enterica and white ibis as a case study
Conversion of natural habitats into urban landscapes can expose wildlife to novel pathogens and alter pathogen transmission pathways. Because transmission is difficult to quantify for many wildlife pathogens, mathematical models paired with field observations can help select among competing transmission pathways that might operate in urban landscapes. Here we develop a mathematical model for the enteric bacteria Salmonella enterica in urban-foraging white ibis (Eudocimus albus) in south Florida as a case study to determine (i) the relative importance of contact-based versus environmental transmission among ibis and (ii) whether transmission can be supported by ibis alone or requires external sources of infection. We use biannual field prevalence data to restrict model outputs generated from a Latin hypercube sample of parameter space and select among competing transmission scenarios. We find the most support for transmission from environmental uptake rather than between-host contact and that ibis–ibis transmission alone could maintain low infection prevalence. Our analysis provides the first parameter estimates for Salmonella shedding and uptake in a wild bird and provides a key starting point for predicting how ibis response to urbanization alters their exposure to a multi-host zoonotic enteric pathogen. More broadly, our study provides an analytical roadmap to assess transmission pathways of multi-host wildlife pathogens in the face of scarce infection data.
FIGURE 2. a in A new species of Gegeneophis Peters (Amphibia: Gymnophiona: Caeciliidae) from the surroundings of Mookambika Wildlife Sanctuary, Karnataka, India
FIGURE 2. a. Dorsolateral view of the head, b. Ventral view of the head, c. Ventral view of the body terminus (photographs of the holotype of Gegeneophis madhavai in life).
Fig. 5 in Habitat Preferences And Activity Patterns Of The Larger Mammal Community In Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, Cambodia
Fig. 5. Mean Relative Abundance Indice (± SEM) for 12 most frequently encountered mammal species in PPWS at camera trap locations closer (black bars) and further (open bars) than 11-km from nearest village. RM red muntjac; EWP Eurasian wild pig; B banteng; E Asian elephant; LIC large Indian civet; EAP east Asian porcupine; L leopard; CPC common palm civet; D dhole; LC leopard cat; G gaur; and PTM pig-tailed macaque.
Fig. 4 in Habitat Preferences And Activity Patterns Of The Larger Mammal Community In Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, Cambodia
Fig. 4. Mean Relative Abundance Indices (± SEM) for 12 most frequently encountered mammal species in PPWS at camera trap locations in DDF (black bars) and SEGF (open bars). RM red muntjac; EWP Eurasian wild pig; B banteng; E Asian elephant; LIC large Indian civet; EAP east Asian porcupine; L leopard; CPC common palm civet; D dhole; LC leopard cat; G gaur; and PTM pig-tailed macaque.
Fig.6 in Habitat Preferences And Activity Patterns Of The Larger Mammal Community In Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, Cambodia
Fig.6. Activity patterns, % of all encounters within each hour, of red muntjacs and Eurasian wild pigs from camera-traps in PPWS.
Fig. 2 in Habitat Preferences And Activity Patterns Of The Larger Mammal Community In Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, Cambodia
Fig. 2. Increase in species richness (species recorded) with total cumulative number of camera trap nights within Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary (Dec 08–Aug 09).
Dataset for: Cattle aggregations at shared resources create potential parasite exposure hotspots for wildlife
<p>Globally rising livestock populations and declining wildlife numbers are likely to dramatically change disease risk for wildlife and livestock, especially at resources where they congregate. However, limited understanding of interspecific transmission dynamics at these hotspots hinders disease prediction or mitigation. In this study, we combined gastrointestinal nematode density and host foraging activity measurements from our prior work in this system with three estimates of parasite-sharing capacity to investigate how interspecific exposures alter the relative riskiness of an important resource – water – among cattle and five dominant herbivore species in an East African tropical savanna. </p> <p>We found that due to their high parasite output, water dependence, and parasite-sharing capacity, cattle greatly increased potential parasite exposures at water sources for wild ruminants. When untreated for parasites, cattle accounted for over two-thirds of total potential exposures around water for wild ruminants, driving 2–23-fold increases in relative exposure levels at water sources. Simulated changes in wildlife and cattle ratios showed that water sources become increasingly important hotspots of interspecific transmission for wild ruminants when the relative abundance of cattle parasites increases. These results emphasize that livestock have significant potential to alter the level and distribution of parasite exposures across the landscape for wild ruminants.</p>
Evaluating the efficacy of drone-based thermal images for measuring wildlife abundance and physiology
<p>Monitoring the population dynamics and behaviors of wildlife is crucial for effective conservation. Although drones can provide a promising alternative to traditional monitoring methods, validation studies must be done to quantify the accuracy of drone-based abundance and distribution estimates in various biological systems. Here, we investigate the use of drones equipped with high-resolution Red-Green-Blue (RGB) and thermal cameras, along with machine learning techniques, for assessments of abundance and physiology in northern elephant seals (<em>Mirounga</em> <em>angustirostris</em>). Aerial images of N=3,415 northern elephant seals were collected at Año Nuevo Reserve during N=24 drone flights, along with ambient air temperatures, wind speed, and time-of-day data. The two-dimensional footprints and surface temperatures of seals were measured from the images. Machine learning algorithms were applied to detect seals in the imagery, and model performance was evaluated. Our findings indicate that seal detection was more accurate using RGB images compared to Thermal images, but that Thermal images could be used to determine that time of day and ambient temperature (but not wind speed or body size) strongly influenced seal external skin temperature. In other words, RGB and Thermal cameras have different strengths and weaknesses that should be carefully considered when designing research studies. Our study highlights the promising integration of drones, thermal imaging, and machine learning for wildlife research, contributing to faster, safer, cheaper, less disruptive, and more accurate wildlife monitoring and conservation efforts.</p>
Data from: Wildlife fecal microbiota exhibit community stability across a semi-controlled longitudinal non-invasive sampling experiment
<p>Wildlife microbiome studies are being used to assess microbial links with animal health and habitat. The gold standard of sampling microbiomes directly from captured animals is ideal for limiting potential abiotic influences on microbiome composition, yet fails to leverage the many benefits of non-invasive sampling. Application of microbiome-based monitoring for rare, endangered, or elusive species creates a need to non-invasively collect scat samples shed into the environment. Since controlling sample age is not always possible, the potential influence of time-associated abiotic factors was assessed. To accomplish this, we analyzed partial 16S rRNA genes of fecal metagenomic DNA sampled non-invasively from Rocky Mountain elk (<em>Cervus canadensis</em>) near Yellowstone National Park. We sampled pellet piles from four different elk, then aged them in a natural forest plot for 1, 3, 7, and 14 days, with triplicate samples at each time point (i.e., a blocked, repeat measures (longitudinal) study design). We compared microbiomes of each elk through time with point estimates of diversity, bootstrapped hierarchical clustering of samples, and a version of ANOVA–simultaneous components analysis (ASCA) with PCA (LiMM-PCA) to assess the variance contributions of time, individual and sample replication. Our results showed community stability through days 0, 1, 3 and 7, with a modest but detectable change in abundance in only 2 genera (<em>Bacteroides</em> and <em>Sporobacter</em>) at day 14. The total variance explained by time in our LiMM-PCA model across the entire 2-week period was not statistically significant (p>0.195) and the overall effect size was small (<10% variance) compared to the variance explained by the individual animal (p<0.0005; 21% var.). We conclude that non-invasive sampling of elk scat collected within one week during winter/early spring provides a reliable approach to characterize microbiome composition in a 16S rDNA survey and that sampled individuals can be directly compared across unknown time points with minimal bias. Further, point estimates of microbiome diversity were not mechanistically affected by sample age. Our assessment of samples using bootstrap hierarchical clustering produced clustering by animal (branches) but not by sample age (nodes). These results support greater use of non-invasive microbiome sampling to assess ecological patterns in animal systems.</p>
An inbreeding perspective on the effectiveness of wildlife population defragmentation measures: A case study on wild boar (Sus scrofa) of Veluwe, The Netherlands
<p>Pervasive inbreeding is a major genetic threat of population fragmentation and can undermine the efficacy of population connectivity measures. Nevertheless, few studies have evaluated whether wildlife crossings can alleviate the frequency and length of genomic autozygous segments. Here, we provided a genomic inbreeding perspective on the potential effectiveness of mammal population defragmentation measures. We applied a SNP-genotyping case study on the ~2500 wild boar Sus scrofa population of Veluwe, The Netherlands, a 1000-km<sup>2 </sup>Natura 2000 protected area with many fences and roads but also, increasingly, fence openings and wildlife crossings. We combined a 20K genotyping assessment of genetic status and migration rate with a simulation that examined the potential for alleviation of isolation and inbreeding. We found that Veluwe wild boar subpopulations are significantly differentiated (FST-values of 0.02-0.07) and have low levels of gene flow. One noteworthy exception was the Central and Southeastern subpopulation, which were nearly panmictic and appeared to be effectively connected through a highway wildlife overpass. Estimated effective population sizes were at least 85 for the meta-population and ranging from 31 to 52 for the subpopulations. All subpopulations, including the two connected subpopulations, experienced substantial inbreeding, as evidenced through the occurrence of many long homozygous segments. Simulation output indicated that whereas one or few migrants per generation could undo genetic differentiation and boost effective population sizes rapidly, genomic inbreeding was only marginally reduced. The implication is that ostensibly successful connectivity restoration projects may fail to alleviate genomic breeding of fragmented mammal populations. We put forward that defragmentation projects should allow for (i) monitoring of levels of differentiation, migration and genomic inbreeding, (ii) anticipation of the inbreeding status of the meta-population, and, if inbreeding levels are high and/or haplotypes have become fixed, (iii) consideration of enhancing migration and gene flow among meta-populations, possibly through translocation.</p>
R scripts, input and output data for: Season of death, pathogen persistence and wildlife behaviour alter number of anthrax secondary infections from environmental reservoirs
<p>An important part of infectious disease management is predicting factors that influence disease outbreaks, such as <em>R</em>, the number of secondary infections arising from an infected individual. Estimating <em>R</em> is particularly challenging for environmentally transmitted pathogens given time lags between cases and subsequent infections. Here, we calculated <em>R</em> for <em>Bacillus anthracis</em> infections arising from anthrax carcass sites in Etosha National Park, Namibia. Combining host behavioural data, pathogen concentrations, and simulation models, we show that <em>R</em> is spatially and temporally variable, driven by spore concentrations at death, host visitation rates and early preference for foraging at infectious sites. While spores were detected up to a decade after death, most secondary infections occurred within two years. Transmission simulations under scenarios combining site infectiousness and host exposure risk under different environmental conditions led to dramatically different outbreak dynamics, from pathogen extinction (<em>R</em><1) to explosive outbreaks (<em>R</em>>10). These transmission heterogeneities may explain variation in anthrax outbreak dynamics observed globally, and more generally, the critical importance of environmental variation underlying host-pathogens interactions. Notably, our approach allowed us to estimate the lethal dose of a highly virulent pathogen non-invasively from observational studies and epidemiological data, useful when experiments on wildlife are undesirable or impractical.</p>
Figure 1. Onchidium typhae Buchannan, 1800 in New Distributional Records of Onchidiid Slugs from Coringa Wildlife Sanctuary, Andhra Pradesh
Figure 1. Onchidium typhae Buchannan, 1800; a) crawling animal in the mud, b) animal in the lab showing the long tentacles, c) the hyponotum and foot. Platevindex tigrinus (Stoliczka, 1869); d) animal on the trunk of the large Avicennia plant, e) animal in lab showing the papillae on the notum, f) hyponotum and foot.
Fig. 2 in Natural history of Zoonotic Babesia: Role of wildlife reservoirs
Fig. 2. Babesia parasites in human erythrocytes. (a) B. divergens, (b) B. venatorum, (c) Babesia sp. MO1 from Kentucky, (d) B. microti, (e) B. duncani, (f) Babesia sp. KO1 from Korea. (1) Paired piriforms; (2) Tetrads; (3) Ring forms. The figure was reprinted with permission from Elsevier first published in Gray et al. (2010). The parasites shown in Fig. 2a, b, c, e, and f were assembled from original photographs, first published as follows: (a) Hunfeld et al., 2008; (b) Häselbarth et al., 2007; (c) Beattie et al., 2002; (e) Kjemtrup et al., 2002; (f) Kim et al., 2007.
Fig. 1 in Natural history of Zoonotic Babesia: Role of wildlife reservoirs
Fig. 1. Phylogenetic tree of Babesia and related piroplasms with zoonotic species bolded. The tree was constructed using neighbor-joining analysis of full-length 18S rRNA gene sequences extracted from GenBank (accession numbers listed for each species). For zoonotic representatives, the endemic country or region is listed in parentheses.
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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.