Cagan H Sekercioglu

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Biology

Birds are integral to many environmental monitoring schemes. However, there has been little research on the ecological basis of utilizing bird species as indicators of their respective communities and habitats. We used point counts to survey 72 landbird species, 16 of conservation concern, in the Dadia Nature Reserve, Greece, in order to understand...

In this study, we evaluated the potential impact of climate change on the distributions of Turkey's songbirds in the 21st century by modelling future distributions of 20 resident and nine migratory species under two global climate change scenarios. We combined verified data from an ornithological citizen science initiative (www.kusbank.org) with ma...

Wetland-dependent migratory songbirds represent one of the most vulnerable groups of birds on the planet, with .67% of wetland-obligate species threatened with extinction. One of the major hurdles for conservation efforts is determining the migration routes, stopover sites, and wintering sites of these species. We describe an annual migration cycle...

The importance of volunteer-based environmental organizations is increasing throughout the world and in Turkey. Globally, there is a large number of NGOs operating in the field of environmental conservation. KuzeyDoga Society operating in Kars since 2007 is one of these institutions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the KuzeyDoga Society in...

Buechley and Sekercioglu introduce vultures, the supreme avian scavengers that now face multiple threats. Available for free @ http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)00134-2

Ecological correlates of North American bird declines

Species declines and extinctions characterize the Anthropocene. Determining species vulnerability to decline, and where and how to mitigate threats, are paramount for effective conservation. We hypothesized that species with shared ecological traits also share threats, and therefore may experience similar population trends. Here, we used a Bayesian...

Human-driven environmental changes shape ecological communities from local to global scales. Within cities, landscape-scale patterns and processes and species characteristics generally drive local-scale wildlife diversity. However, cities differ in their structure, species pools, geographies and histories, calling into question the extent to which...

Human-wildlife conflict is increasing steadily worldwide and is rapidly becoming an important challenge for the success of conservation programs. Brown bears, which suffer from reduced habitat suitability and quality globally, frequently conflict with humans. These animals need large home ranges to fulfill their habitat requirements. When space and...

Alien species can be damaging to native biodiversity, human well‐being and the economy. Identifying the complete range of impacts they cause, and the ways that these impacts are connected, may inform the prioritisation of management actions to mitigate impacts. Using datasets on the biodiversity impacts and monetary costs (damage and management cos...

Aim To investigate spatial variations in the ecological trait structure of breeding bird assemblages on oceanic islands. To test the hypothesis that native and naturalized alien bird species are filtered by different processes, leading to diverging associations between traits and insular environmental gradients. Location Oceanic islands worldwide....

COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020 reduced human mobility, providing an opportunity to disentangle its effects on animals from those of landscape modifications. Using GPS data, we compared movements and road avoidance of 2300 terrestrial mammals (43 species) during the lockdowns to the same period in 2019. Individual responses were variable with no c...

As human density increases, biodiversity must increasingly co-exist with urbanization or face local extinction. Tolerance of urban areas has been linked to numerous functional traits, yet few globally consistent patterns have emerged to explain variation in urban tolerance, which stymies attempts at a generalizable predictive framework. Here, we ca...

How human modification of native habitats changes the feeding patterns and nutritional ecology of tropical birds is critical to conserving avian biodiversity, but tropical bird diets are laborious to investigate using the traditional methods of diet analysis. Stable isotope analysis provides a cost-effective and efficient proxy to identify general...

Biotic interactions are expected to influence species' responses to climate change, but they are usually not included when predicting future range shifts. We assessed the importance of biotic interactions to understand future consequences of climate and land use change for biodiversity using as a model system the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in Europe...

As the world's human population continues to concentrate within urban areas and these landscapes continue to expand worldwide, wildlife is under pressure to adapt to novel environmental disturbances. Along wild-to-urban gradients, and especially within less developed areas, human recreation can affect wildlife behaviour. These effects may be most a...

One of the primary goals of conservation translocation programs should be the maintenance of both population demographic stability and genetic diversity. Here, we provide genetic management recommendations to inform a population reinforcement of the declining Egyptian Vulture population in the Balkans. Specifically, we examined whether the number o...

American black bears typically rely on forested habitats, so it is not expected that they spend prolonged periods of time in shrub-dominated arid lands like the red rock deserts of southeastern Utah. While these areas are known to be used as corridors between metapopulations (i.e. the La Sal mountains, Tavaputs Plateau and Uncompahgre Forest), it w...

Hematology is one of the best population health indicators, and the quickest way to gain insight into some hematological parameters is blood film evaluation. Sometimes, due to the inability to store blood, the unavailability of hematological instruments during field work, or the insufficient amount of blood for complete hematological analysis, bloo...

Billions of birds annually migrate between breeding and nonbreeding grounds in North America. During fall 2020, there was a series of alarming mass-mortality events of migratory birds across the western United States, with estimates of 100,000 to 1 million birds having perished. One potential culprit behind these die-offs is wildfires, though there...

The first Black-headed Penduline Tit (Remiz macronyx) in Turkey was recorded in April 2022, where it was captured and ringed at the Aras River Ornithological Research Station. This is a poorly studied species with a disjunct range consisting of four subspecies. We provide an overview of how to identify, age, and sex individuals within this species...

As human density increases, biodiversity must increasingly co-exist with urbanization or face local extinction. Tolerance of urban areas has been linked to numerous functional traits, yet few globally-consistent patterns have emerged to explain variation in urban tolerance, which stymies attempts at a generalizable predictive framework. Here, we ca...

Managing wildlife populations in the face of global change requires regular data on the abundance and distribution of wild animals but acquiring these over appropriate spatial scales in a sustainable way has proven challenging. Here we present the data from Snapshot USA 2020, a second annual national mammal survey of the United States of America. T...

Human development and roads threaten wildlife through distinct mechanisms and understanding the influence of these elements can better inform mitigation and conservation strategies. We used camera traps to quantify the effects of major roads, environmental factors, and human development on the mammalian community composition between sites north and...

Wildlife are under continuous pressure to adapt to new environments as more land area is converted for human use and human populations continue to concentrate in suburban and exurban areas. This is especially the case for terrestrial mammals, which are forced to navigate these habitat matrices on foot. One way in which mammals may occupy urbanized...

Scavenging is an important ecological process. By quickly locating and consuming carrion, vertebrate scavengers cycle nutrients, stabilize food webs, and may help mitigate disease transmission to humans. Across Africa, many scavengers feed at abattoirs (i.e. slaughterhouses), thereby aiding in waste removal. Little information exists on the scaveng...

As the world urbanizes, identifying traits that allow some species to thrive in cities will be key to predicting which species will likely remain common, and which may require conservation attention. Large, diverse, widely‐distributed, and readily‐documented, raptors represent an ideal taxonomic group to understand how species persist and thrive in...

Predator-prey interactions and human presence are among the key factors shaping large mammal activity patterns. In human-dominated landscapes, large carnivores must balance their activity rhythms between optimizing their feeding opportunities and avoiding encounters with humans. In north-eastern Turkey, the Caucasian lynx (Lynx lynx dinniki), a thr...

Riparian corridors are critical refuges for biodiversity in arid regions like the southwestern US. Birds in particular rely on these habitats for breeding and as migratory stopover sites within a resource-scarce landscape. Climate change is likely to affect the distribution of resources across such landscapes and how birds use riparian zones. In th...

The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent...

Due to the increasing popularity of websites specializing in nature documentation, there has been a surge in the number of people enthusiastic about observing and documenting nature over the past 2 decades. These citizen scientists are recording biodiversity on unprecedented temporal and spatial scales, rendering data of tremendous value to the sci...

Protected areas are highly heterogeneous in their effectiveness at buffering human pressure, which may hamper their ability to conserve species highly sensitive to human activities. Here, we use 60 million bird observations from eBird to estimate the sensitivity to human pressure of each bird species breeding in the Americas. Concerningly, we find...

Vulture populations are in severe decline across Africa and prioritization of geographic areas for their conservation is urgently needed. To do so, we compiled three independent datasets on vulture occurrence from road-surveys, GPS-tracking, and citizen science (eBird), and used maximum entropy to build ensemble species distribution models (SDMs)....

The majority of the world’s biodiversity occurs in the tropics, but human actions in these regions have precipitated an extinction crisis due to habitat degradation, overexploitation, and climate change. Understanding which ecological, biogeographical, and life-history traits predict extinction risk is critical for conserving species. The Philippin...

The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent...

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundr...

The recognized gap between research and implementation in avian conservation can be overcome with translational ecology, an intentional approach in which science producers and users from multiple disciplines work collaboratively to co-develop and deliver ecological research that addresses management and conservation issues. Avian conservation natur...

The recognized gap between research and implementation in avian conservation can be overcome with translational ecology, an intentional approach in which science producers and users from multiple disciplines work collaboratively to co-develop and deliver ecological research that addresses management and conservation issues. Avian conservation natur...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence-based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

An estimated 17% of migratory bird species are threatened or near threatened with extinction. This represents an enormous potential loss of biodiversity and cost to human societies due to the economic benefits that birds provide through ecosystem services and ecotourism. Conservation of migratory bird species presents many unique challenges, as the...

Tropical mountains are global hotspots for birdlife. However, there is a dearth of baseline avifaunal data along eleva-tional gradients, particularly in Africa, limiting our ability to observe and assess changes over time in tropical montane avian communities. In this study, we undertook a multi-year assessment of understory birds along a 1,750 m e...

Human activity and land use change impact every landscape on Earth, driving declines in many animal species while benefiting others. Species ecological and life history traits may predict success in human-dominated landscapes such that only species with "winning" combinations of traits will persist in disturbed environments. However, this link betw...

Eurasian Thick-knee (Burhinus oedicnemus) is a widespread wading bird that occurs throughout much of Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa. We captured a juvenile specimen at the Aras River Ornithological Research Station, Turkey in October 2019, fitted it with a GPS-GSM transmitter, and tracked its migration. The bird migrated from Turkey i...

Globally, birds have been shown to respond to climate change by shifting their elevational distributions. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in the tropics, where elevational gradients are often hotspots of diversity and endemism. Empirical evidence has suggested that elevational range shifts are far from uniform across species, varying greatl...

Aim Species delimitation is fundamental to biology, but disagreement in species concepts and the application of those concepts can lead to substantial variation in species lists, with important implications for conservation. For birds, there are four widely used global checklists that vary in length and application. Here, we investigate the biogeog...

The Red Sea Flyway is the most important route for soaring birds migrating between Eurasia and Africa. The Bab el-Mandeb strait in Djibouti is the narrowest water crossing of the Red Sea and as such, acts as a critical migratory bottleneck at the entrance point into the Horn of Africa. Despite the global significance of this flyway, very limited ob...

With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the Unite...

Turkey is the only country in the world that is almost entirely covered by three global biodiversity hotspots (Caucasus, Iran-Anatolian and Mediterranean), and yet its biodiversity and ecosystems are greatly threatened. Nevertheless in the northeast, where the human population is declining, there is still some potential for the conservation of larg...

1. Long-distance migrations are among the most physically demanding feats animals perform. Understanding the potential costs and benefits of such behaviour is a fundamental question in ecology and evolution. A hypothetical cost of migration should be outweighed by higher productivity and/or higher annual survival, but few studies on migratory speci...

Global warming is predicted to result in upslope shifts in the elevational ranges of bird species in montane habitats. Yet few studies have examined changes over time in the eleva-tional distribution of species along fragmented gradients in response to global warming. Here, we report on a resurvey of an understory bird community in the Usambara Mou...

Protected areas, the most prevalent international policy mechanism for biodiversity conservation, are highly heterogeneous in their effectiveness at buffering ecosystems and species' habitats from human pressure. Protected areas with intense human pressure cannot protect species that are highly sensitive to human activities. Here, we use 60 million...

Tropical mountains harbor globally significant levels of biodiversity and endemism. Climate change threatens many tropical montane species, yet little research has assessed the effects of climate change on the demographic rates of tropical species, particularly in the Afrotropics. Here, we report on the demographic rates of 21 Afrotropical bird spe...

Biodiversity impacts caused by alien species can be severe, including those caused by alien birds. In order to protect native birds, we aimed to identify factors that influence their vulnerability to the impacts of alien birds. We first reviewed the literature to identify native bird species sustaining such impacts. We then assigned impact severity...

COVID-19 has altered many aspects of everyday life. For the scientific community, the pandemic has called upon scientists to continue their work in novel ways, curtailing field and lab research. However, this unprecedented situation also offers an opportunity for researchers to optimize and further develop available field methods. Camera traps are...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence‐based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

Camera traps have become an important research tool for both conservation biologists and wildlife managers. Recent advances in spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) methods have increasingly put camera traps at the forefront of population monitoring programs. These methods allow for benchmark analysis of species density without the need for i...

Variations in stable hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in terrestrial animal tissues are used to reconstruct origin and movement. An underlying assumption of these applications is that tissues grown at the same site share a similar isotopic signal, representative of the location of their origin. However, large variations in tissue isotopic composi...

Climate change threatens to push species to higher elevations and eventual extinction. Birds, in particular, are shown to be shifting upslope in the Neo-tropics and Southeast Asia. Yet previous studies have lacked the temporal resolution to investigate distributional dynamics over time in relation to climatic fluctuations, especially in the underst...

Insectivorous birds reach their highest diversity in the tropics and represent a striking variety of morphological and behavioral specializations for foraging, yet explanations for these patterns are inadequate because of both our limited understanding of the drivers of ecological diversification within and among clades and of coexistence mechanism...