Guangshun Jiang

• PHD
• Research Director at Northeast Forestry University

The Felidae exhibits remarkable diversity in body size, with lengths ranging from 50 to 370 cm and weights from 1.1 to 423 kg. However, the underlying mechanisms driving this variation remain poorly understood. Here, we focused on the Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), the largest of the six extant tiger subspecies, and revealed the surprisi...

Gut microbiota play an influential role in how animals adapt to extreme environments. Two phylogenetically distant mammals, Yunnan snub-nosed monkey and reindeer both adapted to frigid environments. Metagenomic analyses revealed they developed similar cold adaptation strategies in response to food scarcity (enhanced fiber degradation and nitrogen b...

Species interactions remain a cornerstone in shaping community dynamics and structure, alongside other factors, such as climate conditions and human activities. Although network structure is known to influence community stability and ecosystem functioning, the roles of top predators in shaping interaction network structure remain obscure. We examin...

Geographic heterogeneity, encompassing both species‐environment interactions and interspecific relationships, significantly influences the ecological attributes of wildlife habitat selection and population distribution. However, the impact of geographic heterogeneity on the distribution of target species within predator–prey systems, particularly i...

Inbreeding increases genome homozygosity within populations, which can exacerbate inbreeding depression by exposing homozygous deleterious alleles that are responsible for declines in fitness traits. In small populations, genetic purging that occurs under pressure of natural selection acts as an opposing force, contributing to a reduction of delete...

Conserving mammal community stability in forest ecosystems is an urgent challenge in the face of global biodiversity threats and complex trophic interaction. However, understanding of the stability of mammal communities and targeted functional groups is still limited, hindering adaptive strategy development. We collected 210 120 camera trap photos...

Prey populations significantly influence the distribution of top predators. The sika deer (Cervus nippon), a key prey species for the Amur tiger in Northeast China, plays a critical role in the recovery and dispersal of Amur tiger populations. Reintroduction is a pivotal strategy for restoring prey populations, but it presents challenges, especiall...

Fire drives habitat use and interspecific interactions of large herbivores in forest ecosystems, which may be influenced by changes in spatial and temporal scales and vegetation community succession after fire disturbance. In order to reveal the effects of fire disturbance on habitat use and interspecific interactions of sympatric deer species, roe...

Human–wildlife conflict has become a significant challenge for conservationists, particularly in areas where endangered species, such as large carnivores, are recovering. If we fail to keep a balance between the interests of humans and wildlife, the human–wildlife conflict can have adverse outcomes. However, the drivers of human–wildlife conflict,...

Background Escherichia coli is an important intestinal flora, of which pathogenic E. coli is capable of causing many enteric and extra-intestinal diseases. Antibiotics are essential for the treatment of bacterial infections caused by pathogenic E. coli ; however, with the widespread use of antibiotics, drug resistance in E. coli has become particul...

Wild Cervidae(deer and their relatives) play a crucial role in maintaining ecological balance and are integral components of ecosystems. However, factors such as environmental changes and poaching behaviors have resulted in habitat degradation for Cervidae. The protection of wild Cervidae has become urgent, and Cervidae monitoring is one of the key...

The Amur tiger is currently confronted with challenges of anthropogenic development, leading to its population becoming fragmented into two geographically isolated groups: smaller and larger ones. Small and isolated populations frequently face a greater extinction risk, yet the small tiger population’s genetic status and survival potential have not...

Wildlife conservation and management in human-dominated landscapes are major concerns for wildlife ecologists and managers. The dynamics of human disturbance, combined with seasonal limitations in the availability of nutritious foods, may restrict wildlife population growth and recovery. However, understanding how large mammal species adjust their...

Utilization of faeces has long been a popular approach for genetic and ecological studies of wildlife. However, the success of molecular marker genotyping and genome resequencing is often unpredictable due to insufficient enrichment of endogenous DNA in the total faecal DNA that is dominated by bacterial DNA. Here, we report a simple and cheap meth...

The Amur tiger and Amur leopard, among the flagship species, are respectively designated as Endangered and Critically Endangered by IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Population estimates reach over 500 for Amur tiger and over 60 for Amur leopard in the wild, with most of them live in Northeastern China and Far Eastern Russia, and a few individua...

The implications of migration for gut microbial community composition and function, and effects on population health of host animals are poorly known. In this study, we quantified migration patterns and gene flow for moose populations in northeast China and tested their relationships to recent climate warming. And we then characterized moose gut mi...

With the development of artificial intelligence, the integration of LiDAR technologies and foodscape theories to study wildlife habitat, nutritional ecology, species coexistence, and other existing hot and difficult issues would become an international frontier in the field of wildlife habitat ecology and management.

Simple Summary The timely monitoring of the population fluctuations of endangered species and discovering their causes are critical for biodiversity conservation in mountainous areas. To monitor population dynamics and explore the effects of climate and habitat on the population distribution of the hazel grouse, a second-class protected animal in C...

The inbreeding is a big threat for the persistence of genetic diversity in small and isolated populations of endangered species. The homozygous genome could exacerbate inbreeding depression by introducing homozygous deleterious alleles in the population. However, purging of inbreeding loads as they become homozygotes in small populations could alle...

Wildlife conservation in the Anthropocene requires bold conservation solutions including restoration of ecosystems and species. The recovery of large carnivore populations is a conservation goal which can generate significant benefits in terms of ecosystem services, ecological functionality, and human well-being. Tigers Panthera tigris , Asia’s mos...

Habitat selection and daily activity patterns of large herbivores might be affected by inter- and intra-specific interaction, changes of spatial scale, and seasonal temperature. To reveal what factors were driving the habitat selection of moose, we collected moose (Alces alces) and roe deer (Capreolus pygargus bedfordi) occurrence data, analyzed th...

Top predators are important drivers in shaping ecological community structure via top-down effects. However, the ecological consequences and mechanisms of top predator loss under accelerated human impacts have rarely been quantitatively assessed due to the limited availability of long-term community data. With increases in top predator populations...

Apex predator populations are in decline around the world. Many exist at low density and are elusive, making the acquisition of reliable data on their numbers and distribution a considerable challenge. The Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) is the largest of the five extant sub-species of tiger. The single most significant, contiguous population,...

Global warming is deeply influencing various ecological processes, especially regarding the phenological synchronization pattern between species, but more cases around the world are needed to reveal it. We report how the forest leaf phenology and ungulate molting respond differently to climate change, and investigate whether it will result in a pot...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and the relevant hardware can be used for monitoring wild animals. However, existing methods have several limitations. Therefore, this study explored the monitoring and protection of Amur tigers and their main prey species using images from UAVs by optimizing the algorithm mode...

The nocturnal activities of predators and prey are influenced by several factors, including physiological adaptations, habitat quality and, we suspect, corresponds to changes in brightness of moonlight according to moon phase. In this study, we used a dataset from 102 camera traps to explore which factors are related to the activity pattern of Nort...

While dispersal is the basis of inter‐population connectivity, it is difficult to directly observe. New molecular techniques provide ways of studying the intensity and direction of dispersal among populations through quantifying gene flow. When herbivores disperse their gut microbes travel with the host, and gut microbiota is known to play an impor...

The nocturnal activities of animals are influenced by the brightness of the moon in different moon phases. Further, behaviour of prey animals, and also density, may fluctuate in response to predators through both lethal effects and non-lethal (fear) effects. As we understand, wildlife may experience fear from a range of predators, including large c...

Ex situ conservation is one of the major ways to strengthen biodiversity conservation. In China, ex situ conservation institutions mainly include zoos, aquariums, and breeding centers. In 1996, China began to import living animals duty-free for conservation purposes. Here, we built a dataset of nearly 300 vertebrate species (mammals, birds, fish an...

Protected areas are considered the cornerstone of endangered wildlife conservation. However, quantified conservation potentials and limitations of large carnivores in protected areas are lacking. In the Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park (NTLNP) in China, our camera trap survey in 2019 found 26–27 adult Amur tigers and 49–59 adult Amur leopa...

Habitat quality and parasite assembly influence wildlife health, and they are key indicators of health and survivability of wildlife populations. To investigate the potential ecological relationships among habitat type, food nutrients, parasites and hormones in wild boar Sus scrofa, we collected samples of wild boar feces and available plants in th...

The development of facial recognition technology has become an increasingly powerful tool in wild animal individual recognition. In this paper, we develop an automatic detection and recognition method with the combinations of body features of big cats based on the deep convolutional neural network (CNNs). We collected dataset including 12244 images...

The nocturnal activities of predators and prey are influenced by several factors, including physiological adaptations, habitat quality and, we suspect, corresponds to changes in brightness of moonlight according to moon phase. In this study, we used a dataset from 102 camera traps to explore which factors are related with the activity pattern of No...

Background The Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) is the largest and one of the most endangered cats in the world. In wild and captive cats, communication is mainly dependent on olfaction. However, vocal communication also plays a key role between mother and cubs during the breeding period. How cubs express their physiological and psychological n...

Inbreeding more likely occurs in small, isolated and endangered populations, and may influence the sustainable survival of a population. As the Amur tiger Panthera tigris altaica population in China experienced a severe decline in the 1990s, the recovering population may be prone to inbreeding and its potential impacts on population health. However...

There is evidence that cattle grazing in forests limits big cat abundance. There is concern, too, about competition with wild ungulate prey through bottom-up effects on vegetation. Hence, there have been calls to remove or control forest livestock grazing in aid of restoring endangered large carnivores and their prey. To help inform scientific deba...

So far, there has been no safe and convenient method to weigh the large fierce animals, like Amur tigers. To address this problem, we built models to predict the body weight of Amur tigers based on the fact that body weight is proportional to body measurements or age. Using the method of body measurements, we extracted the body measurements from fo...

The activity synchronization rhythm is an important aspect of measuring interspecific interactions between predators and prey, and crucial for large carnivores conservation. However, little is known about what factors relate their activity synchronization dynamics. With the climate change and human society development, the spatial-temporal distribu...

Effects of climate warming on trophic cascades are increasingly reported for large herbivores occupying northern latitudes. During the last 40 years, moose (Alces alces) in northeast China have lost nearly half of their historical distribution through their habitat shifting northwards. There are many possible causes of bottom-up and top-down effect...

Interspecific interactions of commensal non-native species such as domestic dogs and livestock with native wildlife are evident issues in protected areas (PAs). We studied spatiotemporal interactions by combining camera trap photographic sampling over three years. We used a generic multiseason occupancy and co-occurrence analysis and kernel density...

The Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) is critically endangered and also the subspecies of the tiger with the most restoration potential in China. It is challenging to protect large-ranging carnivores like tigers under increasing pressure of human development. To provide a more technically robust foundation for tiger habitat conservation prioriti...

With most large carnivore populations and habitats suffering massive declines across the world, efforts to restore their populations in the wild are of high conservation priority. China attaches great importance to protecting Amur tigers and has made considerable progress towards this goal, but most efforts have been focused on the single Laoyeling...

Ecosystem engineers are organisms that alter the distribution of resources in the environment by creating, modifying, maintaining and/or destroying the habitat. They can affect the structure and function of the whole ecosystem furthermore. Burrowing engineers are an important group in ecosystem engineers as they play a critical role in soil translo...

Appropriate temporal and spatial scales are important prerequisites for obtaining reliable results in studies of wildlife activity patterns and interspecific interactions. The spread of camera‐trap technology has increased interest in and feasibility of studying the activity patterns and interspecific interactions of wildlife. However, such studies...

Simple Summary The North China leopard is a subspecies of leopard distributed in China, but little is known about its population status. This study selected the most active areas of North China leopards to determine the population density and distribution of North China leopards. We found that different prey had different effects on the density dis...

Warming, land-use change, and habitat loss are three major threats to aquatic biodiversity worldwide under the influences of anthropogenic disturbances. Positive feedback between warming and bottom-up regulation may cause irreversible ecological regime shifts. Threshold dynamics of interspecific interactions have been rarely studied in freshwater f...

Both terrestrial and aquatic food webs are characterized by similar key parameters: connectance, robustness, and linkage. Ecosystems vary in basic structures and by processes that govern their dynamics and complexity. A study of complexity, connectance and link density in terrestrial and aquatic food webs, was conducted. We used 49 food webs apport...

Background: Gut microbes significantly contribute to nutrient digestion and absorption, intestinal health and immunity, and are essential for the survival and environmental adaptation of wild animals. However, there are few studies on the gut microbiota of captive and wild North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis). Results: A total of 10...

Hair morphological structure is widely utilized for species identification based on the differentiation of scales and medullar pattern of mammal hairs. To determine what may influence the accuracy of identification using hair morphology, we measured and calculated 11 parameters of hair morphometry of 10 deer species in China. Our results suggested...

China has four sub-species of leopard throughout the country. One of them is the North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis, Gray, 1862) which experiences a wide range of threats. It remains at the centre of interest for recent research and new management policies within its natural habitat. Due to limited studies for a long time, its current...

China has four sub-species of leopard throughout the country. One of them is the North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis, Gray, 1862) which experiences a wide range of threats. It remains at the centre of interest for recent research and new management policies within its natural habitat. Due to limited studies for a long time, its current...

Moose (Alces alces) may be among one of the most susceptible big game species to climate change. Development of long-term circumpolar databases of this species’ densities and distributions, combined with biological, ecological, and management-related metrics, can help guide research and future international management strategies. We emulated method...

Simple Summary Carnivores are among the threatened mammal species due to interactions with humans and environmental effects. We collected data using camera traps across three sampling periods over three years, aiming to study the coexistence mechanisms of three carnivores: the North Chinese leopard, the leopard cat, and the red fox to depict effect...

The potential antagonistic mechanism between zinc (Zn) and arsenic (As) on renal toxicity was investigated in common carp. The results showed that by increased Zn efflux and retention (as reflected by zinc transporter 1 (ZnT-1), Zrt- and Irt- 1ike protein (ZIP) and metallothionein (MT) expression), Zn co-administration significantly recovered the a...

It has been well acknowledged that the gut microbiome is important for host health, composition changes in these microbial communities might increase susceptibility to infections and reduce adaptability to environment. Reintroduction, as an effective strategy for wild population recovery and genetic diversity maintenance for endangered populations,...

Background: Gut microbes significantly contribute to nutrient digestion and absorption, intestinal health and immunity, and are essential for the survival and environmental adaptation of wild animals. However, there are few studies on the gut microbiota of captive and wild North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis). Results: A total of 10 mai...

Background: Gut microbes significantly contribute to nutrient digestion and absorption, intestinal health and immunity, and are essential for the survival and environmental adaptation of wild animals. However, there are few studies on the gut microbiota of captive and wild North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis). Results: A total of 10 mai...

Background: Gut microbes significantly contribute to nutrient digestion and absorption, intestinal health and immunity, and are essential for the survival and environmental adaptation of wild animals. However, there are few studies on the gut microbiota of captive and wild North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis). Results: A total of 10 mai...

Background: Gut microbes significantly contribute to nutrient digestion and absorption, intestinal health and immunity, and are essential for the survival and environmental adaptation of wild animals. However, there are few studies on the gut microbiota of captive and wild North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis). Results: A total of 10 mai...

Simple Summary One of the main conservation issues, both locally and globally, is the issue of human-wildlife conflict. Losses of livestock due to predation by carnivores such as leopards has become a common problem. Residents share negative attitudes toward leopards due to conflicts over the depredation of livestock. Using data obtained from Leagu...

We used a total of 589 independent photos of three species — the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and North China leopard (Panthera pardus japonensis) — from 81 camera traps to study coexistence of those sympatric carnivores. We computed an occupancy model and ran single-season and two-pecies models to examine pattern...

Human-wildlife conflict impacts native wildlife populations and people in socio-economically poor areas. In the Shigar Valley, Karakoram range, Pakistan, subsistence mixed farming is the predominant land use and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes montana) are widely persecuted. Knowledge of the effects of human activity on fox behavior and populations in the...

The automatic individual identification of Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) is important for population monitoring and making effective conservation strategies. Most existing research primarily relies on manual identification, which does not scale well to large datasets. In this paper, the deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) algorithm is c...

As a research field which is blooming quickly in recent years, movement ecology has been a worldwide concern and interest. However, movement ecology is so comprehensive and complicated that many articles only focus on few aspects or species. As tracking technologies and methods of movement data analysis develop, the abundance of movement data becom...

The Amur leopard, one of nine recently recognized subspecies of leopard, is still the most threatened by a stochastic procession of extinction. Evaluation of the potential danger to the conservation of the Amur leopard originating from disease urgently needs to be studied. Unfortunately, research on the potential risk to Amur leopards caused by dis...

In fragmented landscapes, the accessibility of resources not only influences the spatial distribution of the predators themselves, but may similarly affect the abundance of their prey. We studied the influence of habitat dynamics and predator density on the spatial abundance of Cape hare (Lepus capensis) in the Karakorum Range in a 5700 km 2 area i...

Background: Wild Amur tigers are a sparsely populated species, and the conservation of this species is of great concern worldwide, but as an important health risk factor, parasite infection in them is not fully understanding. Results: In this study, sixty-two faecal samples were collected to investigate the frequency and infection intensity of T...

Wildlife interact with environmental variables at different spatial scales. We undertook point counts of birds in the Xianghai wetland reserve of northeastern China from 2000 to 2009, and used remote sensing and GIS technologies to map land cover types. We linked cover types to avian species richness, evenness, and Shannon's diversity using a stepw...

Optimal escape theory predicts that animals would balance the costs and benefits of flight. One cost of not fleeing is the ongoing cost of vigilance for upcom-ing environmental threats. Our results show that FID increases for vigilant hares with predator starting distance, due to the costs acquired by continuing to scan for ecological dangers. The...

Simple Summary Animals living in variable environments require flexible nutritional strategies for dealing with nutritional uncertainty. We investigated the diet and macro-nutritional strategies of male and female moose in six sites in northeast China, representing variable habitat quality and using spatially explicit capture-recapture to determine...

Wildlife, as well as human beings, are prone to be affected by fear. Large predators and mesopredators usually produce this fear in animals. This effect is recognised in the form of various behavioural changes and adaptations, which, in turn, affects the whole ecosystem. However, we often overlook the role of large predators and mesopredators in th...

The ecological threshold concept describes how changes in one or more factors at thresholds can result in a large shift in the state of an ecosystem. This concept focuses attention on limiting factors that affect the tolerance of systems or organisms and changes in them. Accumulating empirical evidence for the existence of ecological thresholds has...

In mammals, especially those that are nocturnal or crepuscular, chemical marks usually play a significant role as environmental labels. Scent marks in mammals can have many functions, including territorial defense and communication signals in the mating season. Furthermore, animals can increase the detectability of marks by selecting highly conspic...

In mammals, especially those that are nocturnal or crepuscular, chemical marks usually play a significant role as environmental labels. Scent marks in mammals can have many functions, including territorial defense and communication signals in the mating season. Furthermore, animals can increase the detectability of marks by selecting highly conspic...

Significance Human impacts and climatic changes are widely considered to be responsible for rapid species extinction. However, determining their effects is challenging owing to the lack of long-term spatial–temporal data. In this study, we quantified the distinctive associations of anthropogenic and climatic stressors with the local extinction of 1...

Simple Summary Humans and domestic dogs may alarm wild animals, and the extent of this can be measured using Flight Initiation Distance (FID). Golden marmots are preyed on by globally-endangered predators such as the snow leopard, and are baited by humans with dogs, potentially causing FID to increase. We measured FID in 72 marmots from four coloni...

The influence of novel and familiar predator cues on prey vigilance and foraging behaviors-8219-APPLIED ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH 17(4):8219-8234. Abstract. During periods of predation risk, prey adopt antipredator behaviours to maximise chances of survival, such as increased vigilance, reduced foraging time, shifting to safe habitat, and...

Background：The Amur leopard, one of nine recently recognized subspecies of leopard, is still most threatened in a stochastic procession of extinction. The potential harmless to the conservation of the Amur leopard originating from the disease is in need of urgent attention. Unfortunately, the research on the potential risk to Amur leopard caused by...

Wildlife interact with environmental variables at different spatial scales. We undertook point counts of birds in the Xianghai wetland reserve of northeastern China from 2000 to 2009, and used remote sensing and GIS technologies to map land cover types. We linked cover types to avian species richness, evenness, and Shannon's diversity using a stepw...