Daniel Hending- PhD
- Research Fellow at University of Oxford
Daniel Hending
- PhD
- Research Fellow at University of Oxford
Research Fellow at the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, University of Oxford.
About
53
Publications
12,374
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339
Citations
Introduction
I am a Research Fellow in the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, University of Oxford, UK. My ongoing research interests include the ecology and conservation of Madagascar's forest habitat and vertebrate fauna, particularly cheirogaleid lemurs. Additionally, I am interested in agroecosystem ecology, and the use of remote sensing for non-invasive biodiversity assessment at the ecosystem level and to disentangle the cryptic species complex.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2018 - June 2021
Position
- PhD Student
Description
- PhD Student in the Bioacoustics and Sensory Ecology Lab
June 2021 - November 2021
September 2016 - present
Bristol Zoological Society
Position
- Research Associate
Description
- Research on the ecology, conservation and agro-ecosystems of Madagascar
Education
September 2018 - September 2022
September 2014 - June 2016
September 2011 - June 2014
Publications
Publications (53)
Plant functional traits are fundamental to ecosystem dynamics and Earth system processes, but their global characterization is limited by the availability of field surveys and trait measurements. Recent expansions in biodiversity data aggregation, including large collections of vegetation surveys, citizen science observations, and trait measurement...
In the past decade, extreme weather and anthropogenic habitat destruction led to considerable declines in amphibian populations around the world. One amphibian species affected by such changes are marsh frogs (Pelophylax ridibundus), water frogs found across Europe and Western Asia. Characterizing the vocal repertoire of marsh frogs may be helpful...
The concept of "facilitated restoration" aims at native biodiversity reinstatement with the help of animal seed dispersers attracted by fruiting trees. Yet, large-crowned trees will have to develop in the early stages of restoration; therefore, seed dispersal provided by small generalist mammals and birds that use rapidly growing herbs, shrubs, and...
Global biodiversity is under accelerating threats, and species are succumbing to extinction before being described. Madagascar’s biota represents an extreme example of this scenario, with the added complication that much of its endemic biodiversity is cryptic. Here we illustrate best practices for clarifying cryptic diversification processes by pre...
Cryptic species are groups of two or more taxa that were previously classified as single nominal species. Being almost morphologically indistinguishable, cryptic species have historically been hard to detect. Only through modern morphometric, genetic, and molecular analyses has the hidden biodiversity of cryptic species complexes been revealed. Cry...
Forest fragmentation and edge effects are two major threats to primate populations. Primates inhabiting fragmented landscapes must survive in a more degraded environment, often with lower food availability compared to continuous forests. Such conditions can have deleterious effects on animal physiological health, yet some primates thrive in these h...
The Flourishing Landscapes Programme (FLP) addresses the triple challenge of livelihoods, climate change, and biodiversity loss at tropical forest frontiers. It will develop novel landscape-scale transdisciplinary research, via a new network of scientists and practitioners, to investigate strategies to enhance both biodiversity and the climate resi...
Fork-marked lemurs (Phaner) are a group of four medium-sized, gummivorous lemur species belonging to the Cheirogaleidae family, representing one of the least-studied primate genera in Madagascar. This study focuses on elucidating the presence and local knowledge of the Endangered Phaner furcifer in the Analanjirofo region of northeastern Madagascar...
The clearing and fragmentation of tropical forests is the single biggest threat to primate populations who depend on this habitat for survival. In contrast to primates that live in continuous, undisturbed forests, primate communities of fragmented forests need to adapt to decreased food availability and increased inter‐ and intraspecific competitio...
Deforestation and habitat fragmentation is the primary threat to primate populations. The primates that live within degraded and anthropogenically disturbed habitats typical of fragmented landscapes have to cope with lower availability of resources in comparison to primates in continuous, undisturbed forests. While some species are sensitive to for...
Objectives:
The investigation of morphological variation in animals is widely used in taxonomy, ecology, and evolution. Using large datasets for meta-analyses has dramatically increased, raising concerns about dataset compatibilities and biases introduced by contributions of multiple researchers.
Materials and methods:
We compiled morphological...
Tropical forests are being cleared at an accelerating rate, despite being one of the most important habitats for global biodiversity. Many remaining tropical forest tracts are now highly degraded and fragmented, which presents a major problem for sensitive and threatened forest-dwelling species that depend on this habitat for survival. In this stud...
Ecological niches are the environmental conditions under which an organism can maintain viable populations. A detailed understanding of an organisms’ ecological niche can provide information on its taxonomy and biogeography, and ecological niche modelling allows researchers to investigate how closely-related species are able to coexist. Ecological...
Primate encounter rates often vary throughout the year due to seasonal differences in activity, ecology, and behaviour. One notably extreme behaviour is continuous hibernation. Although a rare adaptation in primates, the dwarf lemurs of Madagascar (genus Cheirogaleus) enter obligate hibernation each year during the dry season, after spending the we...
Ecological niche modeling (ENM) is particularly useful in the study of cryptic and elusive species that are only rarely seen, difficult to study in the wild, and simultaneously threatened by a multitude of anthropogenic factors. We collected presence records one such example, the understudied Hairy-eared Dwarf Lemur (Allocebus trichotis), from the...
As a result of increasing global demand for food, large areas of natural habitat are being converted to agro-ecosystems to accommodate crop cultivation. This agricultural expansion is most prominent in the tropics, where many rural communities are dependent solely on farming income for their livelihoods. Such agricultural land conversion can have s...
The increasing demand for natural resources has led to continued changes in land use, affecting the survival of many wild species, including non-human primates. One of the major challenges for primate conservation in landscapes dominated by agriculture is to find environmentally friendly alternatives that provide economic benefits to local communit...
Due to global agricultural expansion and intensification, many animal species must now survive within a landscape dominated by agroecosystems. For bats, agroecosystems can provide a valuable foraging-habitat, and many species of bats thrive within such habitats whilst also providing a range of ecosystem services for farmers. Despite this, bat usage...
The destruction and degradation of forest habitats are the biggest drivers of primate population decline and extirpation. Enormous areas of what were once widespread and continuous tropical forest are today highly fragmented, and the populations of many primates are now isolated due to their inability to cross the large open spaces between forest p...
This report summarizes the preliminary findings from the project: Spatial, behavioural and physiological responses of nocturnal lemurs (Cheirogaleidae and Lepilemuridae) to habitat fragmentation in north western Madagascar.
Global climate change is continuing to occur at an alarming rate. In addition to increases in global weather extremes, melting of polar ice caps, and subsequent sea level rises, climate change is known to directly impact the life cycles and ecolo-gies of many animals and plants. While climate change is projected to result in substantial geographic...
This dataset contains a zip file with all thinned occurence point datasets (CSV) for each of the four forest types. A zip file containing all raster layers for the current and future time scenarios, and under both climate trajectories, and a zip file of bias files for each of the four forest types can be downloaded directly from Dryad.
Reforestation in Madagascar often relies on a few tree species with known properties. Species selection may consider aspects like human use, growth characteristics and animal use. Here, we investigated the use of the kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra) as a food source for vertebrates during the dry season in North West Madagascar. We observed 21 native v...
Ecological niche modelling can provide insights into a species’ demography, ecology and biogeography, and the environmental factors that determine them. Exploration of ecological niche models and niche-divergence among closely-related and cryptic organisms can also be useful for species delineation and discrimination, and such information can infor...
Dataset for the article: Hending, D. (2020) Environmental drivers of Cheirogaleidae population density: Remarkable resilience of Madagascar's smallest lemurs to habitat degradation. Ecology and Evolution. 11:5874-5891.
Bioacoustics can be a non-invasive, cost-effective way of studying echolocating bats, and is especially useful for detecting and identifying rare or cryptic species. The insectivorous bats of Madagascar are understudied in comparison to the rest of the island’s fauna, and very little is known about their habitat use. Here, we used a remote bioacous...
Aim: Global animal populations are in decline due to destruction and degradation
of their natural habitat. Understanding the factors that determine the distribution
and density of threatened animal populations is therefore now a crucial component
of their study and conservation. The Cheirogaleidae are a diverse family of small-bodied,
nocturnal lem...
Habitat destruction, anthropogenic disturbance and environmental change are among the primary threats to the forests of Madagascar and the endemic lemurs that inhabit them. The Cheirogaleidae are the smallest of all the lemurs, and are particularly vulnerable to forest fragmentation due to their small body size and inability to travel through the o...
We provide an anecdote of daytime activity within the northern giant mouse lemur (Mirza zaza), a small threatened primate that has always been considered strictly nocturnal, in the Anabohazo forest of northwestern Madagascar. During the dry season, we witnessed two individual M. zaza travelling separately in the afternoon period of three different...
Detailed knowledge of a species’ vocal repertoire is an essential component for the
interpretation of its social interactions and behavior. In the case of cryptic nocturnal primates, vocalizations are also a valuable tool for species identification, and possibly to discriminate between the sexes and/or group memberships during noninvasive field ide...
The geographic distribution of a species can provide insights into its population size, ecology, evolution, and how it responded to past (and may respond to future) environmental change. Improving our knowledge of the distribution of threatened species thus is a high priority in assessing their conservation status. However, there are few data avail...
The geographic distribution of a species can provide insights into its population size, ecology, evolution, and how it responded to past (and may respond to future) environmental change. Improving our knowledge of the distribution of threatened species thus is a high priority in assessing their conservation status. However, there are few data avail...
Agricultural landscapes provide financial livelihoods for farming communities in rural areas. However, such agroenvironments can significantly impact the local floral biodiversity and introduce harmful invasive species to the ecosystem. Despite the prominence of plantations throughout the tropics, their effects on local flora are limited to only a...
It has been proposed that primates use advertisement calls exclusively to negotiate spacing, but the function of female calls has rarely been studied. Here, we investigated the function of male and female advertisement calls in the northern giant mouse lemur (Mirza zaza),a non-gregarious nocturnal primate from north-western Madagascar. We recorded...
Our poster from the Primate Society of Great Britain (PSGB) Winter Meeting at Bristol Zoo Gardens, December 2018.
Poster from the 2018 Bristol Zoological Society Symposium focusing on conservation issues in Madagascar.
Extensive areas of forest are cleared every year to establish new agricultural land in the tropics, resulting in a catastrophic loss in habitat for the world’s primates. A prominent example of this process is Madagascar, where an increasing demand for arable land has led to the once-forested landscape to be now dominated by agricultural areas used...
Primates require secure sleeping sites for periods of rest, but despite their importance, the characteristics of desired sleeping sites are poorly known. Here we investigated the sleeping ecology of a radio-collared population of the Sambirano mouse lemur, Microcebus sambiranensis, during the nonreproductive season in the Anabohazo forest, northwes...
Sheth's dwarf lemur, Cheirogaleus shethi, is a small, recently discovered nocturnal primate endemic to northern Madagascar. Unlike many other nocturnal lemurs, C. shethi lives sympatrically with morphologically similar species of its cryptic genus, making it difficult for biologists to determine its population density and distribution. Here, we pre...
Primate vocalizations convey a variety of information to conspecifics. The acoustic traits of these vocalizations are an effective vocal fingerprint to discriminate between sibling species for taxonomic diagnosis. However, the vocal behavior of nocturnal primates has been poorly studied and there are few studies of their vocal repertoires. We compi...
The Sambirano mouse lemur, Microcebus sambiranensis, is a small, Endangered nocturnal primate endemic to only a few small, fragmented forests within the Sambirano region, north-western Madagascar. Despite it being highly threatened by habitat destruction and fragmentation, it is currently unstudied and nothing is known of its behavioural ecology or...
Questions
Question (1)
I would like to assess the stress levels of small-bodied, solitary nocturnal primates living in forest fragments of varying size, shape and degradation level but am not sure of the best way to do this. As a novice to the field of primate hormones/endocrinology, I have done some reading on the subject and it appears as though cortisol level is the best indicator of physiological stress. However, most published accounts of primate stress studies in the wild are of larger-bodied, social, group-living species that are relatively easy to follow and collect urine/fecal samples from, in comparison to nocturnal species. Furthermore, radio-collaring and tagging of individual seems to be common practice, as sex identification appears to be important for cortisol level assessment. As tagging and sexual identification of nocturnal primates can be very difficult, is there an alternative way to assess the stress level in nocturnal primates, without the hassle and expense of collaring/tagging, and if so, can anyone recommend a method that would allow me to collect samples for analysis? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
