Charles M Francis

• Manager at Environment Canada

The world's rich diversity of bats supports healthy ecosystems and important ecosystem services. Maintaining healthy biological systems requires prompt identification of threats to biodiversity and immediate action to protect species, which for wide‐ranging bat species that span geopolitical boundaries warrants international coordination. Anthropog...

Acoustic recorders are increasingly important for monitoring bird populations and have potential to augment existing monitoring programs such as the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). An advantage of acoustic recordings is that they can be reviewed multiple times by multiple experts, potentially yielding improved estimates of species abunda...

Species distribution modeling is important for predicting species responses to environmental change, but model accuracy can be limited by a lack of data in remote areas. Hierarchically stratified surveys (cluster sampling) offer an efficient approach to sampling in remote areas, but an appropriate balance is needed between cost efficiency and stati...

A new species of small Hipposideros in the bicolor group is described based on specimens from Thailand and Malaysia. It can be distinguished from other small Hipposideros in Southeast Asia by a combination of external, craniodental, and bacular morphology, as well as echolocation call frequency. The new species has a distinct rounded swelling on th...

Shorebirds are declining to a greater extent than many other avian taxa around the world. In North America, shorebirds, along with aerial insectivores and grassland birds, have some of the highest proportions of declining species of any group. Here, we apply a new hierarchical Bayesian model to analyze shorebird migration monitoring data from acros...

Coastlines in marine areas are known to influence use of the airspace as a habitat by migrating birds, but less is known about how the complex configuration of the Great Lakes influences bird migration patterns. If birds alter their migration in response to the lakes, they may become concentrated in specific areas, which should receive particular a...

Understanding roosting behaviour is essential to bat conservation and biomonitoring, often providing the most accurate methods of assessing population size and health. However, roosts can be challenging to survey. Roosts can be physically impossible to access or present risks for researchers and disturbance during monitoring can disrupt natural bat...

Remote sensing can be a valuable alternative or complement to traditional techniques for monitoring wildlife populations, but often entails operational bottlenecks at the image analysis stage. For example, photographic aerial surveys have several advantages over surveys employing airborne observers or other more intrusive monitoring techniques, but...

The recent pandemic and other environmental concerns have resulted in restrictions on research and surveys involving capture and handling bats. While acoustic surveys have been widely used as an alternative survey method, in this study, we show how photographic surveys can offer an important contribution to study and survey bats. We outline approac...

Aim: Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroeco...

Relatively high mortality of migratory bats at wind energy facilities has prompted research to understand the underlying spatial and temporal factors, with the goal of developing more effective mitigation approaches. We examined acoustic recordings of echolocation calls at 12 sites and post-construction carcass survey data collected at 10 wind ener...

Calls for biodiversity conservation practice to be more evidence based are growing, and we agree evidence use in conservation practice needs improvement. However, evidence‐based conservation will not be realized without improved access to evidence. In medicine, unlike in conservation, a well‐established and well‐funded layer of intermediary individ...

To address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, conservation approaches must be underpinned by robust information. Canada is uniquely positioned to contribute to meeting global biodiversity targets, with some of the world's largest remaining intact ecosystems, and a commitment to co-application of Indigenous ways of knowing alongside scientific,...

Collaborative monitoring over broad scales and levels of ecological organization can inform conservation efforts necessary to address the contemporary biodiversity crisis. An important challenge to collaborative monitoring is motivating local engagement with enough buy-in from stakeholders while providing adequate top-down direction for scientific...

We censused three colonies of Northern Fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) along eastern Baffin Island, Canada, that were estimated to support 155 000 breeding pairs in 1973, but had not been adequately counted since then. The colonies were surveyed in July and August 2018 using photographs taken from a helicopter or a drone. The combined estimated colony...

Predicting and mitigating impacts of climate change and development within the boreal biome requires a sound understanding of factors influencing the abundance, distribution, and population dynamics of species inhabiting this vast biome. Unfortunately, the limited accessibility of the boreal biome has resulted in sparse and spatially biased samplin...

Bats in urban areas depend on trees, and bat activity increases with tree cover. To effectively manage bat habitat in cities, it is important to know the distance to which tree cover most strongly influences bats (i.e., the ‘scale of effect’). The aim of this study was to estimate the scale of effect of tree cover on bats in Toronto, Canada. To ach...

The increasing spatial resolution of earth observation satellites is creating new opportunities to survey wildlife. Satellites could be particularly valuable for surveying polar bears (Ursus maritimus) because of their remote circumpolar distribution and status of concern in the face of Arctic warming. However, the white coloration of bears does no...

Long-distance migrants are assumed to be more time-limited during the pre-breeding season compared to the post-breeding season. Although breeding-related time constraints may be absent post-breeding, additional factors such as predation risk could lead to time constraints that were previously underestimated. By using an automated radio telemetry sy...

Southeast (SE) Asia holds high regional biodiversity and endemism levels but is also one of the world's most threatened regions. Local, regional and global threats could have severe consequences for the future survival of many species and the provision of ecosystem services. In the face of myriad pressing environmental problems, we carried out a r...

Capsule: Monitoring of demographic parameters by volunteer ringers provides insight into the factors driving population changes in owls. Aims: To assess the value of national ringing, recapture and recovery data from volunteers to understand population dynamics. Methods: We analysed 49 years of ringing, recapture and recovery data from throughout F...

Computer-automated image analysis techniques can save time and resources for detecting and counting birds in aerial imagery. Sophisticated object-based image analysis (OBIA) software is now widely available and has proven effective for various challenging detection tasks, but there is a need to develop accessible and readily adaptable procedures th...

Pressure to increase food production poses a challenge for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes. Previous studies suggest that one potential way to enhance biodiversity without taking land out of production is to increase the landscape heterogeneity of farmland by increasing the diversity of crop types in the landscape, and/or the c...

Urbanization in North America has replaced many pre-existing natural environments with artificial, human-populous environments of low biodiversity. Although some bat species have persisted in urban environments, the overall abundance and diversity of bats within them is low. We examined five factors that may contribute to the low diversity of bats...

Emulating natural disturbance has become a paradigm for biodiversity retention in forest management. This study evaluates the extent to which harvest management practices have created stands that emulate natural fire disturbance from the perspective of bird communities in Ontario, Canada. We compared the relative abundance of forest landbirds at th...

The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) was established in 1966 in response to a lack of quantitative data on changes in the populations of many bird species at a continental scale, especially songbirds. The BBS now provides the most reliable regional and continental trends and annual indices of abundance available for >500 bird species. This...

We describe a new collaborative network, the Motus Wildlife Tracking System (Motus; https://motus.org), which is an international network of researchers using coordinated automated radio-telemetry arrays to study movements of small flying organisms including birds, bats, and insects, at local, regional, and hemispheric scales. Radio-telemetry has b...

Bird surveys conducted using aerial images can be more accurate than those using airborne observers, but can also be more time-consuming if images must be analyzed manually. Recent advances in digital cameras and image-analysis software offer unprecedented potential for computer-automated bird detection and counts in high-resolution aerial images....

Wind turbines have been hypothesized to affect bat populations; however, no comprehensive analysis of bat mortality from the operation of wind turbines in Canada has been conducted. We used data from carcass searches for 64 wind farms, incorporating correction factors for scavenger removal, searcher efficiency, and carcasses that fell beyond the ar...

Spectral reflectance within the 350-2500 nm range was measured for 17 pelts of arctic mammals (polar bear, caribou, muskox, and ringed, harp and bearded seals) in relation to snow. Reflectance of all pelts was very low at the ultraviolet (UV) end of the spectrum (< 10%), increased through the visual and near infrared, peaking at 40%-60% between 110...

Kerivoula krauensis was formally described in 2007 and until recently was only known from tropical forest in central peninsular Malaysia. We report four new records, which, together with recent published collections, extend the known range for this species to peatswamps, lowland and montane forests in Borneo and Sumatra (Brunei and Indonesia), and...

Quantification of regional or national variation in population trends is an integral component of assessing species conservation status, and ideally uses spatial and temporal replicate surveys across the breeding or wintering ranges. However, populations of boreal-breeding birds are often monitored using site-specific trends in the number of indivi...

North American populations of aerial insectivorous birds are in steep decline. Aerial insectivores (AI) are a group of bird species that feed almost exclusively on insects in flight, and include swallows, swifts, nightjars, and flycatchers. The causes of the declines are not well understood. Indeed, it is not clear when the declines began, or wheth...

The purpose of the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) is to create a continent-wide program to monitor bats at local to rangewide scales that will provide reliable data to promote effective conservation decisionmaking and the long-term viability of bat populations across the continent. This is an international, multiagency program. Four...

The purpose of the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) is to create a continent-wide program to monitor bats at local to rangewide scales that will provide reliable data to promote effective conservation decisionmaking and the long-term viability of bat populations across the continent. This is an international, multiagency program. Four...

Lower abundance of forest birds near high traffic roads is usually attributed to traffic noise, but the potential role of traffic mortality has not been adequately tested. We tested for the effect of traffic mortality independent of traffic noise, by sampling forest birds at sites with similar traffic volume (and noise levels), that varied in the l...

Departure decisions of songbirds at ecological barriers they encounter en route can strongly influence time, energy and survival costs of migration. To date, most field studies of departure decisions and their correlates have used indirect methods and followed migrants at a single stopover site, with limited information on what happens to individua...

A new genus and associated species of false vampire, family Megadermatidae, are described based on three specimens from Bala Forest, Narathiwat Province, peninsular Thailand. The new taxon is characterised by a unique combination of distinctive dental, cranial, and external characters, some of which are shared with exclusively African genera and so...

Responses of biodiversity to changes in both land cover and climate are recognized [ 1 ] but still poorly understood [ 2 ]. This poses significant challenges for spatial planning as species could shift, contract, expand, or maintain their range inside or outside protected areas [ 2–4 ]. We examine this problem in Borneo, a global biodiversity hotsp...

Hypsugo was regarded as a subgenus of Pipistrellus by many authors, but its generic distinctiveness is now widely accepted. According to recent taxonomic arrangements, nine species are known to occur in Southeast Asia. During the investigation of material recently collected from Lao PDR and Vietnam we identified an additional species and hence desc...

This article introduces a special issue of papers presented at the EURING 2013 technical conference on the analysis of data from marked individuals. The EURING technical conferences were originally established to bring together ecologists and statisticians to develop methods to estimate demographic parameters such as survival, recruitment, density,...

Sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome b (1140 bp) and nuclear Rag 2 (1148 bp) genes were used to assess the evolutionary history of the cosmopolitan genus Myotis, based on a worldwide sampling of over 88 named species plus 7 lineages with uncertain taxonomic status. Phylogenetic reconstructions of this comprehensive taxon sampling show that mos...

Canadian data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) provide information on the population status and trends for over 300 species that regularly breed in Canada. Since the first assessments were made in the mid-1970s, both the dataset and the suite of statistical tools and techniques available to researchers have grown. As a result, Can...

Inland dispersal of migrating land birds away from the coast, often opposite to the direction of migration, occurs frequently. Many of these movements may involve migrants seeking improved stopover conditions farther inland, but direct study of inland flights and of the ecological factors influencing their occurrence is limited. We used an automate...

Use of soft-metal (aluminum alloy) bands on gulls (Laridae) is known to result in high rates of band loss and, as a result, hard-metal (monel, incoloy, or stainless steel) bands are superior for most studies. However, the U.S. Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) and the Canadian Wildlife Service Bird Banding Office continue to issue soft bands for use on...

During the examination of a series of specimens, formerly referred to Myotis montivagus, recently collected in Vietnam and Lao PDR, we found that they differ in several important ways from any species formerly included in M. montivagus. We describe them as a new species characterised by a relatively long forearm, moderately long ears, flat cranial...

We estimated impacts on birds from the development and operation of wind turbines in Canada considering both mortality due to collisions and loss of nesting habitat. We estimated collision mortality using data from carcass searches for 43 wind farms, incorporating correction factors for scavenger removal, searcher efficiency, and carcasses that fel...

Sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome b (1140 bp) and nuclear Rag 2 (1148 bp) genes were used to assess the evolutionary history of the cosmopolitan bat genus Myotis, based on a worldwide sampling of over 88 named species plus 7 species with uncertain nomenclature. Phylogenetic reconstructions of this comprehensive taxon sampling show that most...

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