Barry Anthony Nickel

• Managing Director at University of California, Santa Cruz

Background: Under current scenarios of climate change and habitat loss, many wild animals, especially large predators, are moving into novel energetically challenging environments. Consequently, changes in terrain associated with such moves may heighten energetic costs and effect the decline of populations in new localities. Methods: To examine...

Helping the world’s coastal communities adapt to climate change impacts requires evaluating the vulnerability of coastal communities and assessing adaptation options. This includes understanding the potential for ‘natural’ infrastructure (ecosystems and the biodiversity that underpins them) to reduce communities’ vulnerability, alongside more tradi...

Human impacts on wildlife stem from both our footprint on the landscape and the presence of people in wildlife habitat. Each may influence wildlife at very different spatial and temporal scales, yet efforts to disentangle these two classes of anthropogenic disturbance in their effects on wildlife have remained limited, as have efforts to predict th...

Great leaps forward in scientific understanding are often spurred by innovations in technology. The explosion of miniature sensors that are driving the boom in consumer electronics, such as smart phones, gaming platforms, and wearable fitness devices, are now becoming available to ecologists for remotely monitoring the activities of wild animals. W...

AimWe investigated the effects of disease on the local abundances and distributions of species at continental scales by examining the impacts of white-nose syndrome, an infectious disease of hibernating bats, which has recently emerged in North America.LocationNorth America and Europe.Methods We used four decades of population counts from 1108 popu...

Accelerometers are useful tools for biologists seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the daily behavior of cryptic species. We describe how we used GPS and tri-axial accelerometer (sampling at 64 Hz) collars to monitor behaviors of free-ranging pumas (Puma concolor), which are difficult or impossible to observe in the wild. We attached collars...

Background/Question/Methods Sociality in animals varies across orders of magnitude from solitary animals to colonies composed of millions of individuals. What drives such large variation in social organization remains poorly understood, but is important for explaining macroecological patterns of abundance and distribution. We investigated the imp...

Stressors associated with human activities interact in complex ways to affect marine ecosystems, yet we lack spatially explicit assessments of cumulative impacts on ecologically and economically key components such as marine predators. Here we develop a metric of cumulative utilization and impact (CUI) on marine predators by combining electronic tr...

The spatial scale at which organisms respond to human activity can affect both ecological function and conservation planning. Yet little is known regarding the spatial scale at which distinct behaviors related to reproduction and survival are impacted by human interference. Here we provide a novel approach to estimating the spatial scale at which a...

The effect of different housing density scales, h , on the housing density coefficient for each behavior. (DOCX)

Influence of covariate combinations on the optimal housing density scale, h , for each behavior. (DOCX)

To ensure that our statistical procedure for choosing the behaviorally specific scales at which pumas are responding to housing density was not an artifact of different covariates in the best fit model for each behavior, we computed AIC scores across scales of housing density ranging from 50–1000 meters for each behavior, using the covariates from...

Background/Question/Methods Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) – targeted ecosystem management, conservation, and restoration that will help people adapt to climate change – has the potential to both protect biodiversity and reduce the impacts of climate change. For example, restoring and/or conserving mangroves protects coastal communities from tr...

French translation of the abstract. (PDF)

Spanish translation of the article. (PDF)

Tractable conservation measures for long-lived species require the intersection between protection of biologically relevant life history stages and a socioeconomically feasible setting. To protect breeding adults, we require knowledge of animal movements, how movement relates to political boundaries, and our confidence in spatial analyses of moveme...