Daire Carroll

University of Gothenburg | GU

Wildlife contributes to the diets, livelihoods and socio-cultural activities of people worldwide; however, unsustainable hunting is a major pressure on wildlife. Regional assessments of the factors associated with hunting offtakes are needed to understand the scale and patterns of wildlife exploitation relevant for policy. We synthesized 83 studies...

Background Understanding how free-ranging animals behave can help in the design of optimal management strategies to both conserve species and enable individuals to express natural behaviours, maximising welfare. Animal-borne accelerometers passively collect data on body acceleration which can be interpreted to quantify behaviour. Accelerometers are...

Body mass is a fundamental indicator of animal health closely linked to survival and reproductive success. Systematic assessment of body mass for a large proportion of a population can allow early detection of changes likely to impact population growth, facilitating responsive management and a mechanistic understanding of ecological trends. One cha...

Background Quantifying animal behaviour is important to many areas of ecology and conservation. Understanding how free ranging animals behave can help in the design of optimal management strategies to both conserve species and enable individuals to express natural behaviours, maximising welfare. This is particularly important for endangered species...

We introduce the seal pup count using drones problem. Drones, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are used to fly over a marine archipelago during the birthing season to estimate the number of harbour seal pups. Pup counts are used as an environmental indicator of ecosystem health and as inputs to national wildlife management policies. W...

The Baltic Sea is home to a genetically isolated and morphologically distinct grey seal population. This population has been the subject of 120‐years of careful documentation, from detailed records of bounty statistics to annual monitoring of health and abundance. It has also been exposed to a range of well‐documented stressors, including hunting,...

Changes in species abundance and distribution are driven by short-term interactions between individuals and their environment, as well as by long-term shifts in climate, prey abundance, disease outbreaks and predators, acting across generations. Unfortunately, management of wildlife populations by humans has often overlooked these long-term effects...

Ash dieback is a disease caused by the fungal pathogen Hymenoscyphus fraxineus. Since its emergence in the 1990s, this pandemic disease has spread throughout much of the native range of its host species, the European ash (Fraxinus excelsior). Where present, it can kill up to 85% of ash trees. The loss of these trees has had an enormous impact, part...

The ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii Smuts 1832) is vulnerable to extinction due to poaching and trafficking. Recovery of pangolins from the trade and subsequent rehabilitation and release form a core component of pangolin conservation. Post-release monitoring of rehabilitated pangolins through the attachment of very high frequency (VHF) transmi...

In this review, we summarize the state of knowledge of the influence of light on the activity and physiology of elasmobranchs (sharks, skates, rays, and sawfish). These are a diverse group with great economic and ecological importance. The long-term success of a species is largely determined by its ability to respond to changes in its environment....

Detecting changes in population trends depends on the accuracy of estimated mean population growth rates and thus the quality of input data. However, monitoring wildlife populations poses economic and logistic challenges especially in complex and remote habitats. Declines in wildlife populations can remain undetected for years unless effective moni...

The whale shark ( Rhincodon typus ) is an endangered species with a declining global population. The South Ari Atoll Marine Protected Area (SAMPA), Maldives, is one of few locations globally where year-long residency of individuals occurs. This SAMPA aggregation appears to consist almost exclusively of immature males. Due to its year-round residenc...

This is one of a series of case studies, sponsored by the British Society for Plant Pathology, on damaging plant diseases which have had-and continue to have-major economic, social and environmental impacts around the world. The case studies provide an historical overview of how scientists have responded to plant pandemics and the evolution and eff...

Colonization of the root surface, or rhizoplane, is one of the first steps for soil-borne bacteria to become established in the plant microbiome. However, the relative contributions of processes, such as bacterial attachment and proliferation is not well characterized, and this limits our ability to comprehend the complex dynamics of microbial comm...