E. Hance Ellington

University of Florida | UF · Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Hybridization between animal species is likely to increase as distributional and reproductive barriers continue to break down due to anthropogenically driven changes in habitat and climate. Yet, the influence of hybridization on ecological interactions and ecosystem function remains understudied. Animal space use, an important component of ecosyste...

Wildlife can respond to urbanization positively (synanthropic) or negatively (misanthropic), and for some species, this is a nonlinear process, whereby low levels of urbanization elicit a positive response, but this response becomes negative at high levels of urbanization. We applied concepts from foraging theory to predict positive and negative be...

Population monitoring is a critical part of effective wildlife management, but methods are prone to biases that can hinder our ability to accurately track changes in populations through time. Calf survival plays an important role in ungulate population dynamics and can be monitored using telemetry and herd composition surveys. These methods, howeve...

The dynamic environmental conditions in highly seasonal systems likely have a strong influence on how species use the landscape. Animals must balance seasonal and daily changes to landscape risk with the underlying resources provided by that landscape. One way to balance the seasonal and daily changes in the costs and benefits of a landscape is thr...

Wildlife living in proximity to people are exposed to both natural and anthropogenic factors that may influence cortisol production associated with stress response. While some species, including coyotes (Canis latrans), have become commonplace in developed areas throughout North America, urban individuals still must navigate ever-changing, novel en...

¡Aprende más sobre los azulejos de garganta canela de Florida! La serie de hojas informativas sobre la vida silvestre de Florida se creó para brindar al público una introducción rápida y precisa a la vida silvestre de Florida, tanto nativa como invasiva. Esperamos que estos documentos inspiren a las personas a investigar la vida silvestre en sus pr...

Learn more about Florida Eastern Bluebirds! The Wildlife of Florida Factsheet series was created to provide the public with a quick accurate introduction to Florida’s wildlife, including both native and invasive. We hope these factsheets inspire people to investigate wildlife in their own backyard and communities and understand the amazing biodiver...

This document describes the most commonly used trapping techniques, traps, and gate designs fro trapping wild pigs. Updated with E. Hance Ellington. Original version: Wight, Bethany Rose, and Raoul Keith Boughton. 2018. “Feral Swine Trapping: Techniques and Designs: WEC395/UW440, 6/2018”. EDIS 2018 (3). https://doi.org/10.32473/edis-uw440-2018.

Invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are considered one of the most damaging species globally, and once they become established in an area, they are notoriously difficult to eliminate. As such, identifying the potential pathways of invasion, especially in places with emerging populations, is critical for preventing new or continued invasion. Wild pigs h...

From the perspective of prey, movement synchrony can represent either a potent anti-predator strategy or a dangerous liability. Prey must balance the costs and benefits of using conspecifics to mediate risk and the emergent patterns of risk-driven sociality depends on the spatial variation and trait composition of the system. Our literature review...

Wildlife increasingly live in and adapt to urban landscapes as natural habitat becomes urbanized. Many carnivores take advantage of undeveloped or open developed areas called green spaces, such as parks or cemeteries, to meet their requirements in urban areas. For instance, coyotes ( Canis latrans ) expanded their range across most of North America...

Context Mapping landscape connectivity across large spatial extents is an important component of ecological reserve network designs and species recovery plans. It can, however, be limited by computational power. One way to overcome this problem is to split the study area into smaller tiles, map landscape connectivity within each of those tiles, and...

In ungulates, parturition is correlated with a reduction in movement rate. With advances in movement-based technologies comes an opportunity to develop new techniques to assess reproduction in wild ungulates that are less invasive and reduce biases. DeMars et al. (2013, Ecology and Evolution 3:4149-4160) proposed two promising new methods (individu...

R code for population-based method. (PDF)

4-hour GPS interval data. (PDF)

Supplementary figures and tables. (PDF)

For many organisms, climate change can directly drive population declines, but it is less clear how such variation may influence populations indirectly through modified biotic interactions. For instance, how will climate change alter complex, multi-species relationships that are modulated by climatic variation and that underlie ecosystem-level proc...

Context By the early 1900s, river otters (Lontra canadensis) were extirpated across large parts of their range in North America. Over the last several decades they have made a remarkable recovery through widespread reintroduction programs. River otters were reintroduced in Ohio, USA, between 1988 and 1993, and restricted and limited harvesting of t...

Fishers (Pekania pennanti) are often associated with the coniferous and mixed forests of the northern United States and central Canada, and their ecology has been studied extensively in portions of their distributional range. Recently, natural range expansion and reintroductions have led to recolonization by fishers to portions of the central Appal...

I examined how urbanization influenced coyote territory size and movement behavior. As urbanization increased, coyote territories did not become larger but became more complex. As urbanization increased, coyote activity decreased. When coyotes are active, however, they spent more time traveling than foraging and when they were traveling, they were...

Influence of spatial memory on patterns of coyote resource selection

Divergent caribou calf survival and recruitment: the role of ecological factors and methodological biases

Space use and movement patterns of coyotes in Cape Breton Highlands NP

Background Characterizing the movement patterns of animals is an important step in understanding their ecology. Various methods have been developed for classifying animal movement at both coarse (e.g., migratory vs. sedentary behavior) and fine (e.g., resting vs. foraging) scales. A popular approach for classifying movements at coarse resolutions i...

Generalist predators typically have broad diets, but their diets may become constrained when one species of prey becomes disproportionately available. Yet there is poor understanding regarding whether generalist predators exhibit stereotypic relationships with pulsed prey resources. We used telemetry data from 959 woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandu...

Background: Characterizing the movement patterns of animals is an important step in understanding their ecology. Various methods have been developed for classifying animal movement at both coarse (e.g., migratory vs. sedentary behavior) and fine (e.g., resting vs. foraging) scales. A popular approach for classifying movements at coarse resolutions...

Background: Characterizing the movement patterns of animals is an important step in understanding their ecology. Various methods have been developed for classifying animal movement at both coarse (e.g., migratory vs. sedentary behavior) and fine (e.g., resting vs. foraging) scales. A popular approach for classifying movements at coarse resolutions...

Background: Characterizing the movement patterns of animals is an important step in understanding their ecology. Various methods have been developed for classifying animal movement at both coarse (e.g., migratory vs. sedentary behavior) and fine (e.g., resting vs. foraging) scales. A popular approach for classifying movements at coarse resolutions...

Background: Characterizing the movement patterns of animals is an important step in understanding their ecology. Various methods have been developed for classifying animal movement at both coarse (e.g., migratory vs. sedentary behavior) and fine (e.g., resting vs. foraging) scales. A popular approach for classifying movements at coarse resolutions...

1.Climate can have direct and indirect effects on population dynamics via changes in resource competition or predation risk, but this influence can be modulated by density- or phase-dependent processes. We hypothesized that for ungulates, climatic conditions close to parturition have a greater influence on the predation risk of neonates during popu...

Estimates of Newfoundland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) calf survival derived from biotelemetry data and from herd composition surveys (HCS) were in general agreement from 1979-1997 but differed from 2003-2012, suggesting changes in caribou ecology or biases in the field methods over time. In this report, I examined methodological factors tha...

My objective was to understand how individual variation, in conjunction with variation in habitat, can affect individual and population-level variation in animal space use. I used coyotes (Canis latrans) as a model species to investigate the roles of hybridization, an inherited intrinsic factor, and spatial memory, a learned intrinsic factor, on sp...

Peer review is pivotal to science and academia, as it represents a widely accepted strategy for ensuring quality control in scientific research. Yet, the peer-review system is poorly adapted to recent changes in the discipline and current societal needs. We provide historical context for the cultural lag that governs peer review that has eventually...

Habitat selection is a multi-level, hierarchical process that should be a key component in the balance between food acquisition and predation risk avoidance (food – predation trade-off ). However, to date, studies have not fully elucidated how fine- and broad-scale habitat decisions by individual prey can help balance food versus risk. We studied b...

There is a growing need for scientific synthesis in ecology and evolution. In many cases, meta‐analytic techniques can be used to complement such synthesis. However, missing data are a serious problem for any synthetic efforts and can compromise the integrity of meta‐analyses in these and other disciplines. Currently, the prevalence of missing data...

Background/Question/Methods Hybridization between animal species is likely to increase as distributional and reproductive barriers continue to break down due to anthropogenically-driven habitat and climate changes, yet the role that hybridization might play in shaping future space use patterns is understudied. Animal space use is a complex intera...

Information on fisher (Martes pennanti) resource selection in deciduous forests of eastern North America is limited. We studied resting habitat selection in a fisher population that recolonized predominantly deciduous forest in Pennsylvania, USA, during 2006–2007. We quantified selection by comparing used and randomly selected available sites at 2...

Fisher once occurred throughout Pennsylvania but were extirpated by the early 1900s due to overharvest and habitat loss. Regeneration of forests, prolonged absence of a trapping season, and reintroduction efforts in the 1990s resulted in increased fisher reports throughout a large portion of the Commonwealth. Nonetheless, formal post-reintroduction...