Graeme Shannon

Bangor University

Effective methods for monitoring animal populations are crucial for species conservation and habitat management. Motion‐activated cameras provide an affordable method for passively surveying animal presence across the landscape but have mainly been used for studying large‐bodied mammals. This paper explores the relative abundance and habitat prefer...

There is great potential for the use of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) to quantify aspects of habitat structure in the study of animal ecology and behaviour. Viewsheds-the area visible from a given position-influence an animal's perception of risk and ability to respond to potential danger. The management and conservation of large herbivores and...

Understanding how systemic biases influence local ecological communities is essential for developing just and equitable environmental practices that prioritize both human and wildlife well-being. With over 270 million residents inhabiting urban areas in the United States, the socioecological consequences of racially targeted zoning, such as redlini...

Predictive models can improve the efficiency of wildlife management by guiding actions at the local, landscape and regional scales. In recent decades, a vast range of modelling techniques have been developed to predict species distributions and patterns of population spread. However, data limitations often constrain the precision and biological rea...

Understanding how disease moves through wildlife communities is essential to managing outbreaks of zoonotic diseases across the globe. Bovine tuberculosis is a disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis that can threaten domestic and wildlife species. The mechanism by which Mycobacterium bovis is spread between species is still poorly unde...

There is great potential for the use of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) to quantify aspects of habitat structure in the study of animal ecology and behaviour. Viewsheds-the area visible from a given position-influence an animal's perception of risk and ability to respond to potential danger. The management and conservation of large herbivores and...

Does non-human communication, like language, involve meaning? This question guides our focus through an interdisciplinary review of the theories and terminology used to study meaning across disciplines and species. Until now, it has been difficult to apply the concept of meaning to communication in non-humans. This is partly because of the varied a...

Large herbivores, such as elephants, have been eradicated from large swaths of their historic ranges due to habitat loss and intense hunting pressure. However, in areas where they are still alive, they frequently engage in conflicts with humans due to crop raiding or because their natural habitats are being fragmented, limiting the natural movement...

Anthropogenic noise is a major pollutant in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Since the industrial revolution, human activities have become increasingly noisy, leading to both acute and chronic disturbance of a wide variety of animals. Chronic noise exposure can affect animals over their lifespan, leading to changes in species interactions and li...

Understanding how systemic biases influence local ecological communities is essential for developing just and equitable environmental practices that center both human and wildlife wellbeing. With over 270 million United States residents inhabiting urban areas, understanding the socio-ecological consequences of racially-targeted zoning, such as redl...

This report presents a method for monitoring the relative abundance of red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) in coniferous forests using remotely activated cameras. We also investigated habitat associations from the data, which were collected in two forests (Newborough and Pentraeth) on Anglesey. Woodland habitats were categorised as broadleaf, conifers...

For large herbivores living in highly dynamic environments, maintaining range fidelity has the potential to facilitate the exploitation of predictable resources while minimising energy expenditure. We evaluate this expectation by examining how the seasonal range fidelity of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in the Kruger National Park, South A...

Introduction Over recent decades, the abundance and geographic ranges of wild ungulate species have expanded in many parts of Europe, including the UK. Populations are managed to mitigate their ecological impacts using interventions, such as shooting, fencing and administering contraception. Predicting how target species will respond to interventio...

What is the relationship between language and animal communication? This has largely been discussed within research on language evolution and disciplines beyond linguistics, but impacts upon the study of language generally. There are two extant views on the nature of this relationship: either there is a stark divide, with language considered as com...

The transmission of reliable information between individuals is crucial for group-living animals. This is particularly the case for cognitively advanced mammals with overlapping generations that acquire detailed social and ecological knowledge over long lifetimes. Here, we directly compare the ecological knowledge of elephants from two populations,...

Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) is a common morphological trait in ungulates, with polygyny considered the leading driver of larger male body mass and weapon size. However, not all polygynous species exhibit SSD, while molecular evidence has revealed a more complex relationship between paternity and mating system than originally predicted. SSD is, the...

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46s8778g

Vigilance is a costly behaviour but it enables animals to detect and avoid threats of predation and intraspecific competition. To compensate for the increased risk while sleeping, many bird species have evolved eye‐blinking strategies called peeking, which allows vigilance to persist in a sleep‐like state. However, the drivers of vigilance behaviou...

Increasing anthropogenic noise is having a global impact on wildlife, particularly due to the masking of crucial acoustical communication. However, there have been few studies examining the impacts of noise exposure on communication in free-ranging terrestrial mammals. We studied alarm calls of black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) acros...

The article Alarm call modification by prairie dogs in the presence of juveniles

The surge in research interest focusing on the effects of anthro-pogenic noise on wildlife over the past two decades has greatly increased awareness of the pervasive nature of this global pollutant across aquatic and terrestrial habitats (Barber et al. 2010; Shannon et al. 2016). Harding et al. (2019) now provide a timely review on this research to...

While several drivers of wildlife alarm calls have been identified, recent work on the impact of the audience on the plasticity of alarm calling indicates that intraspecific communication can drive this behavior. We build on this literature by assessing changes in call characteristics in black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) in the prese...

The goal of this book is to empower operators, regulators, and tourists to find the critical balance between possibly damaging consequences of wildlife tourism and the potential benefits to the local human communities, ecosystems, and the wildlife themselves. It is essential to realize that ecotourism is frequently more environmentally friendly tha...

Ecotourism is often considered highly compatible with conservation efforts because it generates revenue through the nonconsumptive use of wildlife (in contrast to, e.g., fishing and hunting), while helping to foster a conservation ethic among participants. However, it is becoming clear that human presence in natural areas is not without cost. Evide...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

ABSTRACT: Diverse biological consequences of noise exposure are documented by an extensive literature. Unfortunately, the aggregate value of this literature is compromised by inconsistencies in noise measurements and incomplete descriptions of metrics. These studies commonly report the noise level (in decibels, dB) at which a response was measured....

Global increases in environmental noise levels – arising from expansion of human populations, transportation networks, and resource extraction – have catalysed a recent surge of research into the effects of noise on wildlife. Synthesising a coherent understanding of the biological consequences of noise from this literature is challenging. Taxonomic...

Global increases in environmental noise levels arising from expansion ofhuman populations, transportation networks, and resource extraction have catalysed a recent surge of research into the effects of noise on wildlife. Synthesising a coherent understanding of the biological consequences of noise from this literature is challenging. Taxonomic grou...

Increasing scientific evidence shows that anthropogenic noise can impact behavioral, demographic, and community-level processes across a range of taxa—presenting a serious conservation challenge. Given the direct link between antipredator behavior and fitness, it is important to explore the impacts of noise on vigilance and flight. To do this, we c...

Human activities have caused a near-ubiquitous and evolutionarily-unprecedented increase in environmental sound levels and artificial night lighting. These stimuli reorganize communities by interfering with species- specific perception of time-cues, habitat features, and auditory and visual signals. Rapid evolutionary changes could occur in respons...

Rapid human population growth and habitat modification in the western United States has led to the formation of urban and exurban rangelands. Many of these rangelands are also home to populations of black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus). Our study aimed to compare the vegetation composition of an urban and exurban rangeland, and explore...

Motion-activated cameras are a versatile tool that wildlife biologists can use for sampling wild animal populations to estimate species occurrence. Occupancy modelling provides a flexible framework for the analysis of these data; explicitly recognizing that given a species occupies an area the probability of detecting it is often less than one. Des...

Prey species have to balance their foraging and vigilance behaviour in order to maximize nutritional and energetic intake while avoiding predation. Anthropogenic noise, a ubiquitous form of human disturbance, has the potential to influence antipredator behaviour through its effects on predator detection and perceived risk. Noise might increase perc...

Human activities in protected areas can affect wildlife populations in a similar manner to predation risk, causing increases in movement and vigilance, shifts in habitat use and changes in group size. Nevertheless, recent evidence indicates that in certain situations ungulate species may actually utilize areas associated with higher levels of human...

Significance Recognizing predators and judging the level of threat that they pose is a crucial skill for many wild animals. Human predators present a particularly interesting challenge, as different groups of humans can represent dramatically different levels of danger to animals living around them. We used playbacks of human voice stimuli to show...

Multi-level fission-fusion societies, characteristic of a number of large brained mammal species including some primates, cetaceans and elephants, are among the most complex and cognitively demanding animal social systems. Many free-ranging populations of these highly social mammals already face severe human disturbance, which is set to accelerate...

The vegetation dynamics of the savanna ecosystem are driven by complex interactions between biotic and abiotic factors, and thus are expected to exhibit emergent properties of biocomplexity. We explore the relative importance of static and dynamic drivers in explaining the patterns of mortality of large trees in the Kruger National Park, South Afri...

Elephant and fire are considered to be among the most important agents that can modify the African savanna ecosystem. Although the synergistic relationship between these two key ecological drivers is well documented, it has proved much more difficult to establish the relative effects they have on savanna vegetation structure at a fine-scale over ti...

In this paper we analyse the daytime movements of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in different habitats in the Pongola Game Reserve, South Africa. On average adult males moved faster than females in all habitat types except when grouped together (then females moved at the faster male pace). Elephants demonstrated distinct movement patterns i...

The value of age is well recognized in human societies, where older individuals often emerge as leaders in tasks requiring specialized knowledge, but what part do such individuals play in other social species? Despite growing interest in how effective leadership might be achieved in animal social systems, the specific role that older leaders may pl...

The allometric relationships of body size play a principle role in determining how large herbivores respond to the marked spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the savanna biome. Using location data collected over an 8-year period from five distinct study sites, we investigated the influence of environmental variation (using phenological and rainfa...

Aim Artificial water points are often used in protected savanna ecosystems to maintain populations of large herbivores. However, these interventions lead to increased ranging and foraging pressure and can negatively impact important habitats and species. This study investigated the influence of artificial water provision on the foraging and movemen...

Acquiring greater understanding of the factors causing changes in vegetation structure - particularly with the potential to cause regime shifts - is important in adaptively managed conservation areas. Large trees (≥5 m in height) play an important ecosystem function, and are associated with a stable ecological state in the African savanna. There is...

Elephant are believed to be one of the main ecological drivers in the conversion of savanna woodlands to grassland. We assessed the impacts of elephant on large trees (≥5 m in height) in the southern section of the Kruger National Park. Tree dimensions and utilization by elephant were recorded for 3082 individual trees across 22 transects (average...

Elephant are believed to be one of the main ecological drivers in the conversion of savanna woodlands to grassland. We assessed the impacts of elephant on large trees (≥5 m in height) in the southern section of the Kruger National Park. Tree dimensions and utilization by elephant were recorded for 3082 individual trees across 22 transects (average...

The activity budget hypothesis is 1 of 4 main hypotheses proposed to explain sexual segregation by large herbivores. Because of their smaller body size, females are predicted to have higher mass-specific energy requirements and lower digestive efficiency than males. As a result, females are expected to forage longer to satisfy their nutritional dem...

We examined daytime movements of a herd of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) at 10-min, 15-min, and 20-min intervals in Pongola Game Reserve, South Africa. This group tended to proceed in a consistent direction during consecutive movements, especially during long moves. Serial movement lengths and serial movement angles were autocorrelated at...

Elephants (Loxodonta africana) exhibit pronounced sexual dimorphism, and in this study we test the prediction that the differences in body size and sociality are significant enough to drive divergent foraging strategies and ultimately sexual segregation. Body size influences the foraging behaviour of herbivores through the differential scaling coef...

Sexual segregation is a commonly observed phenomenon in dimorphic ungulates, which has been categorised into two distinct components: social segregation and habitat segregation. In this study we investigated whether elephants were sexually segregated at the habitat scale. The locations of 12 family groups and 16 males, in three distinct populations...

The ranging behaviour and habitat occupancy by three elephant groups (cow herd, bulls, and an orphan group) were studied over a two-year period in a small, fenced reserve. No summer dispersal was observed. Distinct seasonal home ranges were exhibited for all groups, with the summer (wet season) ranges being smaller than the winter (dry season) rang...

The ranging behaviour and habitat occupancy by three elephant groups (cow herd, bulls, and an orphan group) were studied over a two-year period in a small, fenced reserve. No summer dispersal was observed. Distinct seasonal home ranges were exhibited for all groups, with the summer (wet season) ranges being smaller than the winter (dry season) rang...