Contemporary niche contraction affects climate change predictions for elephants and giraffes
Aim: Climate change assessments are largely based on correlative species distribution models (SDMs) that are sensible to spatial biases or incompleteness of input distribution data. We tested whether changes on the species’ climatic niche resulting from recent human-induced range contractions have a significant influence on SDM predictions of future species distributions. Location: Africa. Methods: For […]
Automated species identification for camera trapping in the Iona Skeleton Coast Trans-Frontier Conservation Area
The Iona Skeleton Coast Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA), straddling the border between Angola and Namibia, has suffered through decades of civil war and poaching. While this history has been detrimental to the community of large mammals in the TFCA, data collected on the mammal populations are insufficient to enable effective management. Survey methods such as […]
Three-gene PCR and high-resolution melting analysis for differentiating vertebrate species mitochondrial DNA for biodiversity research and complementing forensic surveillance
Reliable molecular identification of vertebrate species from morphologically unidentifiable tissue is critical for the prosecution of illegally-traded wildlife products, conservation-based biodiversity research, and identification of blood-meal hosts of hematophagous invertebrates. However, forensic identification of vertebrate tissue relies on sequencing of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) ‘barcode’ gene, which remains costly for purposes of screening […]
An automated program to find animals and crop photographs for individual recognition
Detailed data on individual animals are critical to ecological and evolutionary studies, but attaching identifying marks can alter individual fates and behavior leading to biases in parameter estimates and ethical issues. Individual-recognition software has been developed to assist in identifying many species from non-invasive photographic data. These programs utilize algorithms to find unique individual characteristics […]
Measuring Behaviour: The Tools and the Strategies
Animal behaviour can be viewed as a stream of elements, which, once accurately described, can be counted and timed. Data acquisition techniques and tools are reviewed, and some strategies for collection and analysis of data using PC computers are suggested. Automated instruments are not satisfactory for the study of complex behaviour and as such systemic […]
Right on track? Performance of satellite telemetry in terrestrial wildlife research
Satellite telemetry is an increasingly utilized technology in wildlife research, and current devices can track individual animal movements at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions. However, as we enter the golden age of satellite telemetry, we need an in-depth understanding of the main technological, species-specific and environmental factors that determine the success and failure of satellite […]
Necks and networks: a preliminary study of population structure in the reticulated giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis reticulata de Winston)
This paper describes a method of scoring the neck pattern of reticulated giraffes as a simple code that can be searched for in an Excel spreadsheet. This enables several hundred individual giraffe to be recognized and repeatedly found within a database. Possible sources of error are described and quantified. Data on group size, dispersal within […]