Amanda Trask

• MRes Ecology; BSc Biology
• PostDoc Position at Zoological Society of London

Conservation translocations are widely used to recover threatened species, but can pose risks to recipient ecosystems, particularly in the case of conservation introductions. Because of limited data and uncertainty, risk assessments for such projects often rely on extrapolated evidence and expert opinion, further complicating decision making. The E...

Ex situ threatened species management has both conservation and welfare objectives and these objectives often align, but can diverge. Areas of agreement can present win‐wins for achieving welfare and conservation objectives, while identifying areas of divergence is important to ensure management strategies achieve balance across objectives. We exam...

Conceptual and methodological advances in population and evolutionary ecology are often pursued with the ambition that they will help identify demographic, ecological and genetic constraints on population growth rate (λ), and ultimately facilitate evidence‐based conservation. However, such advances are often decoupled from conservation practice, im...

Overall impacts of targeted conservation interventions on population growth rate (λ) will depend on within‐year and among‐year variation in exposure of target individuals to interventions, and in intervention efficacy in increasing vital rates of exposed individuals. Juvenile survival is one key vital rate that commonly varies substantially within...

Inbreeding can depress individuals’ fitness traits and reduce population viability. However, studies that directly translate inbreeding depression on fitness traits into consequences for population viability, and further, into consequences for management choices, are lacking. Here, we estimated impacts of inbreeding depression ( B , lethal equivale...

Effective evidence‐based conservation requires full quantification of the impacts of targeted management interventions on focal populations. Such impacts may extend beyond target individuals to also affect demographic rates of non‐target conspecifics (e.g. different age classes). However, such collateral (i.e. unplanned) impacts are rarely evaluate...

Accurate and robust population monitoring is essential to effective biodiversity conservation. Citizen scientists are collecting opportunistic biodiversity records on unprecedented temporal and spatial scales, vastly outnumbering the records achievable from structured surveys. Opportunistic records may exhibit spatio-temporal biases and/or large he...

Small, declining populations can face simultaneous, interacting, ecological and genetic threats to viability. Conservation management strategies designed to tackle such threats independently may then prove ineffective. Population viability analyses that evaluate the efficacy of management strategies implemented independently versus simultaneously a...

A population's effective size ( N e ) is a key parameter that shapes rates of inbreeding and loss of genetic diversity, thereby influencing evolutionary processes and population viability. However, estimating N e , and identifying key demographic mechanisms that underlie the N e to census population size ( N ) ratio, remains challenging, especially...

Deleterious recessive alleles that are masked in outbred populations are predicted to be expressed in small, inbred populations, reducing both individual fitness and population viability. However, there are few definitive examples of phenotypic expression of lethal recessive alleles under inbreeding conditions in wild populations. Studies that demo...