Ivar Herfindal

Ivar Herfindal
Norwegian University of Science and Technology | NTNU · Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics

dr. scient.

About

115
Publications
33,153
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
4,182
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2004 - December 2012
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Publications

Publications (115)
Poster
Full-text available
Simulation based models have great potential to help managers make informed decisions in the face of uncertain changes in the ecosystem and to identify data gaps. A modelling framework of this feedback loop between the landscape and a herbivore under different scenarios of changes: climate, human pressure, and within and between-species (muskox) co...
Article
Full-text available
Caring for newborn offspring hampers resource acquisition of mammalian females, curbing their ability to meet the high energy expenditure of early lactation. Newborns are particularly vulnerable, and, among the large herbivores, ungulates have evolved a continuum of neonatal antipredator tactics, ranging from immobile hider (such as roe deer fawns...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Seasonal migrations, such as those of ungulates, are particularly threatened by habitat transformations and fragmentation, climate and other environmental changes caused by anthropogenic activities. Mountain ungulate migrations are neglected because they are relatively short, although traversing heterogeneous altitudinal gradients particularly...
Article
Full-text available
Animal behaviour is important for prevalence and outbreaks of infectious diseases, for instance by affecting individual interactions. Increasing the knowledge of individual movement patterns can provide better insight into disease prevalence and spread, helping to target efforts to minimise disease outbreaks. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fata...
Article
Full-text available
Spatially synchronized population dynamics are common in nature, and understanding their causes is key for predicting species persistence. A main driver of synchrony between populations of the same species is shared environmental conditions, which cause populations closer together in space to be more synchronized than populations further from one a...
Article
Full-text available
Disentangling empirically the many processes affecting spatial population synchrony is a challenge in population ecology. Two processes that could have major effects on the spatial synchrony of wild population dynamics are density dependence and variation in environmental conditions like temperature. Understanding these effects is crucial for predi...
Preprint
Populations closer together in space are more likely to experience shared environmental fluctuations. This correlation in experienced environmental conditions is the main driver of spatial population synchrony, defined as the tendency for geographically separate populations of the same species to exhibit parallel fluctuations in abundance over time...
Article
Full-text available
Spatial population synchrony is common among populations of the same species and is an important predictor of extinction risk. Despite the potential consequences for metapopulation persistence, we still largely lack understanding of what makes one species more likely to be synchronized than another given the same environmental conditions. Generally...
Article
Full-text available
Protected areas are central in strategies to conserve biodiversity. Effective area-based conservation relies on biodiversity data, but the current biodiversity knowledge base is insufficient and limited by geographic and taxonomic biases. Public participation in biodiversity monitoring such as via community-based monitoring or citizen science incre...
Preprint
Full-text available
Seasonal migrations are central ecological processes connecting populations, species and ecosystems in time and space. Land migrations, such as those of ungulates, are particularly threatened by habitat transformations and fragmentation, climate change and other environmental changes caused by anthropogenic activities. Mountain ungulate migrations...
Preprint
Full-text available
Spatial population synchrony is common among populations of the same species and is an important predictor of extinction risk. Despite the potential consequences for metapopulation persistence, we still largely lack understanding of what makes one species more likely to be synchronized than another given the same environmental conditions. Generally...
Article
Full-text available
Large carnivores influence ecosystem dynamics in multiple ways, for example, by suppressing meso‐carnivores and providing carrions for smaller scavengers. Loss of large carnivores is suggested to cause meso‐carnivore increase and expansion. Moreover, competition between meso‐carnivores may be modified by the presence of larger carnivores. In tundra...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the mechanisms of ecological community dynamics and how they could be affected by environmental changes is important. Population dynamic models have well known ecological parameters that describe key characteristics of species such as the effect of environmental noise and demographic variance on the dynamics, the long‐term growth rate...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The panel-based assessment of ecosystem condition (PAEC) is an evidence-based ap-proach to assess the condition of Norwegian ecosystems. The assessment is carried out by an expert panel with broad expertise in the ecosystems to be assessed and is inspired by approaches used in international assessments such as IPCC and IPBES. The assessment follows...
Article
Full-text available
Environmental variation in time and space affects biological processes such as extinction risk and speed of adaptation to environmental change. The spatial structure of environmental variation may vary among ecosystems, for instance due to differences in the flow of nutrients, genes and individuals. However, inferences about ecosystem spatial scale...
Article
Full-text available
Harvesting can have a substantial impact on population dynamics and individual performance in wild populations. While the direct consequences of harvest on individual survival and population growth rate are often apparent, harvesting can also have indirect and more subtle demographic consequences. Disentangling these consequences, however, requires...
Article
Full-text available
Environmental variation in time and space generates complex patterns in the spatial structure of temporally covarying populations. Accounting for spatial population structure is important for sustainable management and harvest, but there is a need for a better understanding of the many mechanisms affecting the spatial structure of populations. In t...
Article
Full-text available
The sustainable use of natural resources is critical for addressing the global challenges of today. Strategies for sustainable harvesting need to consider not only harvested species, but also other non-harvested species interacting with them in the same ecosystem. In addition, environmental variation needs to be considered, with climate change curr...
Poster
Full-text available
Recent studies indicate that environmentally-driven (spatial) population synchrony (i.e., the ‘Moran effect’) may change under global warming, affecting extinction probabilities of populations/species. However, the reliability of the few methodologies used to quantify temporal changes in spatial synchrony has not been evaluated yet. We thus confron...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding components of interspecific competition has long been a major goal in ecological studies. Classical models of competition typically consider equal responses of all individuals to the density of competitors, however responses may differ both among individuals from the same population, and between populations. Based on individual long‐t...
Article
Full-text available
Habitat fragmentation may affect species distributions through, for example, altered resource availability and shifts in species interactions. Fragmentation by roads has had negative impacts on Fennoscandian alpine ecosystems, with reduction of habitats and connectivity for alpine species. Concurrently, infrastructure development causes influx of s...
Article
Full-text available
Landscape changes are happening at an unprecedented pace, and together with high levels of wildlife harvesting humans have a large effect on wildlife populations. A thorough knowledge of their combined influence on individual fitness is important to understand factors affecting population dynamics. The goal of the study was to assess the individual...
Article
Full-text available
Theory predicts that animal populations will be synchronized over large distances by weather and climatic conditions with high spatial synchrony. However, local variation in population responses to weather, and low synchrony in key weather variables or in other ecological processes may reduce the population synchrony. We investigated to what extent...
Technical Report
Nøkkelord: utmark, barskog, beite, husdyr, landbruk, skogsbeiteprosjektet Keywords: rural, boreal forest, grazing, livestock, subsistence, natural resource management
Article
Full-text available
The world is spatially autocorrelated. Both abiotic and biotic properties are more similar among neighboring than distant locations, and their temporal co‐fluctuations also decrease with distance. P. A. P. Moran realized the ecological importance of such ‘spatial synchrony’ when he predicted that isolated populations subject to identical log‐linear...
Article
Full-text available
Levels of random genetic drift are influenced by demographic factors, such as mating system, sex ratio and age structure. The effective population size (Ne) is a useful measure for quantifying genetic drift. Evaluating relative contributions of different demographic factors to Ne is therefore important to identify what makes a population vulnerable...
Article
Full-text available
Context Many species experience ecosystem changes due to alterations in climate or interspecific interactions. Animals’ optimal use of landscapes involves adjusting spatial displacement and habitat use according to weather or climate, however, competitive interactions may affect such behavioural responses. Species in alpine landscapes are already a...
Article
Full-text available
The ‘Moran effect’ predicts that dynamics of populations of a species are synchronized over similar distances as their environmental drivers. Strong population synchrony reduces species viability, but spatial heterogeneity in density dependence, the environment, or its ecological responses may decouple dynamics in space, preventing extinctions. How...
Article
Full-text available
The synchrony of population dynamics in space has important implications for ecological processes, for example affecting the spread of diseases, spatial distributions and risk of extinction. Here, we studied the relationship between spatial scaling in population dynamics and species position along the slow‐fast continuum of life history variation....
Article
Full-text available
Individual patterns of habitat use emerge from behavioral decisions driven by interactions between landscape characteristics and individual traits. Individual traits, such as age and sex, influence the net gain of using habitats and associated resources, and thus the relationship between size and composition of the home range. However, the pathways...
Article
Age at first reproduction is an important determinant of individual variation in reproductive success in ungulates, but few studies have examined its relationship with later fitness‐related traits in males. We used a long‐term individual based study of a harvested moose population to quantify the individual reproductive performance and survival of...
Article
Full-text available
The prevalence of livestock grazing in wildlife areas is increasing. This transformation of ecosystems into agroecosystems is concerning because the introduction of new species may cause niche displacement of the functionally related native species. We used a large‐scale fence scheme and fecal analyses to study the influence of free‐ranging livesto...
Article
Full-text available
Trade-offs between fitness-related traits are predicted from the principle of resource allocation, where increased fecundity or parental investment leads to reduced future reproduction or survival. However, fitness traits can also be positively correlated due to individual differences (e.g. body mass). Age at primiparity could potentially explain v...
Article
Co-existing species at the same trophic level often segregate with respect to diet, habitat use, or spatial distribution, reducing their direct competition for resources. However, temporal patterns in species-specific habitat use, for instance due to climatic variation, may affect the strength of interspecific interactions, and generate temporal va...
Article
Translocation of individuals from source populations to augment small populations facing risk of extinction is an important conservation tool. Here we examine sex-specific differences between resident and translocated house sparrows Passer domesticus in reproductive success and survival, and the contribution of translocated individuals to the growt...
Article
Full-text available
The spatial scale of animal space use, e.g. measured as individual home range size, is a key trait with important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes as well as management and conservation of populations and ecosystems. Explaining variation in home range size has therefore received great attention in ecological research. However,...
Article
Full-text available
The spatial scale of animal space use, e.g. measured as individual home range size, is a key trait with important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes as well as management and conservation of populations and eco-systems. Explaining variation in home range size has therefore received great attention in ecological research. However...
Article
Full-text available
Partially migratory populations comprise both resident and migratory individuals. These tactics may coexist if their demographic contribution to future generations (i.e. fitness) are equal or vary temporally with environmental conditions, or if individuals switch between being migrant and resident. Alternatively, the choice of movement tactic can b...
Data
Data S1. Evaluation of animal treatment effects on movement patterns. Figure S1. Locations and home ranges (95% minimum convex polygon) for five raccoon dog pairs (red = females, blue = males). Figure S2. Displacement (distance from the mean location of an individual at a given day, to the release location) in relation to days since release, for...
Article
Full-text available
Efficient targeting of actions to reduce the spread of invasive alien species relies on understanding the spatial, temporal, and individual variation of movement,in particular related to dispersal. Such patterns may differ between individuals at the invasion front compared to individuals in established and dense populations due to differences in en...
Article
Full-text available
Migratory animals can represent links between protected and unprotected parts of their home ranges. Management of such species outside a conservation area can influence species interactions inside the protected zone. This may result in unintended effects on populations of conservation concern even if they spend their entire life cycle within the pr...
Article
Full-text available
In many species, population dynamics are shaped by age-structured demographic parameters, such as survival, which can cause age-specific sensitivity to environmental conditions. Accordingly, we can expect populations with different age-specific survival to be differently affected by environmental variation. However, this hypothesis is rarely tested...
Data
Full-text available
Supplementary files from the article "Age-specific survival and annual variation in survival of female chamois differ between populations"
Article
The loss, fragmentation and degradation of habitat everywhere on Earth prompts increasing attention to identifying landscape features that support animal movement (corridors) or impedes it (barriers). Most algorithms used to predict corridors assume that animals move through preferred habitat either optimally (e.g. least cost path) or as random wal...
Article
Environmental variation can induce life‐history changes that can last over a large part of the lifetime of an organism. If multiple demographic traits are affected, expected changes in climate may influence environmental covariances among traits in a complex manner. Thus, examining the consequences of environmental fluctuations requires that indivi...
Article
Full-text available
Gathering information on how invasive species utilize the habitat is important, in order to better aim actions to reduce their negative impact. We studied habitat use and selection of 55 GPS-marked raccoon dogs (30 males, 25 females) at their invasion front in Northern Sweden, with particular focus on differences between males and females, between...
Article
Full-text available
Mechanisms reducing inbreeding are thought to have evolved owing to fitness costs of breeding with close relatives. In small and isolated populations, or populations with skewed age- or sex distributions, mate choice becomes limited, and inbreeding avoidance mechanisms ineffective. We used a unique individual-based dataset on moose from a small isl...
Article
Full-text available
Maintenance of metabolic rate ( MR , the energy cost of self‐maintenance) is linked to behavioural traits and fitness and varies substantially within populations. Despite having received much attention, the causes and consequences of this variation remain obscure. Theoretically, such within‐population variation in fitness‐related traits can be main...
Article
Full-text available
1. Impediments to animal movement are ubiquitous and vary widely in both scale and permeability. It is essential to understand how impediments alter ecological dynamics via their influence on animal behavioural strategies governing space use and, for anthropogenic features such as roads and fences, how to mitigate these effects to effectively manag...
Article
Large-scale variation in mammalian body size has often been found to be related to environmental conditions. A general finding among large herbivores is that body size increases with decreasing temperature (Bergmann's rule), because animals with larger body size have better heat conservation or fasting tolerance, or because higher quality forage oc...
Article
Full-text available
Animal movements in the landscape are influenced by linear features such as rivers, roads and power lines. Prior studies have investigated how linear features, particularly roads, affect movement rates by comparing animal's movement rate measured as step lengths (i.e., the distance between consecutive observations such as GPS locations) before, dur...
Article
The joint spatial and temporal fluctuations in community structure may be due to dispersal, variation in environmental conditions, ecological heterogeneity among species and demographic stochasticity. These factors are not mutually exclusive, and their relative contribution towards shaping species abundance distributions and in causing species fluc...
Article
Full-text available
The effects of landscape composition on species and populations have become increasingly important due to large and rapid habitat changes worldwide. In particular, concern is raised for several forest-dwelling species such as capercaillie and black grouse, because their habitats are continuously changing and deteriorating from human development. Co...
Article
Full-text available
Large-scale geographical variation in phenotypic traits within species is often correlated to local environmental conditions and population density. Such phenotypic variation has recently been shown to also be influenced by genetic structuring of populations. In ungulates, large-scale geographical variation in phenotypic traits, such as body mass,...
Article
Full-text available
Inbreeding can affect fitness-related traits at different life history stages and may interact with environmental variation to induce even larger effects. We used genetic parentage assignment based on 22 microsatellite loci to determine a 25 year long pedigree for a newly established island population of moose with 20-40 reproducing individuals ann...
Article
Full-text available
Habitat selection studies generally assume that animals select habitat and food resources at multiple scales to maximise their fitness. However, animals sometimes prefer habitats of apparently low quality, especially when considering the costs associated with spatially heterogeneous human disturbance. We used spatial variation in human disturbance,...
Article
Full-text available
The Prehensile-Tailed Skink (Corucia zebrata) (Scincidae) is endemic to the Solomon Archipelago, where it inhabits all major islands. The species is evolutionarily distinct and diverged from its nearest relatives during the Oligocene. To expand on the limited information available with respect to the life history and ecology of C. zebrata in the wi...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies of animal habitat selection are inferring more detail regarding the behavioural mechanisms involved, like functional responses and familiarity effects. Changes in animals’ use or selection of a habitat type with changing availability are commonly interpreted as a functional response in habitat preference. Studies of familiarity infer...
Technical Report
Bioforsk takserte elgbeitene i Salsbruket juli 2013. Salsbruket utgjør i overkant av 500 000 sammenhengende daa med utmark i kystskogregionen av Trøndelag. Som elgbeite er området preget av lav skoggrense (200-300 moh), maritimt klima (årsnedbør 2500 mm) og harde bergarter som gir låg skogbonitet (innslag av kalk i lavere områder, hvor det er mer p...
Article
Full-text available
Populations can vary considerably in their response to environmental fluctuations, and understanding the mechanisms behind this variation is vital for predicting effects of environmental variation and change on population dynamics. Such variation can be caused by spatial differences in how environmental conditions influence key parameters for the s...