Katarzyna Nowak

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• PhD
• Adjunct at University of Warsaw

Linear infrastructure and militarization are ubiquitous features of the Anthropocene. Transboundary areas are increasingly vulnerable to both on account of border security measures implemented by the non-environment sector; as such, they require special attention for effective biodiversity and ecological connectivity conservation. Białowieża Forest...

Ekspertyza przedstawia próbę oceny wpływu zapory granicznej między Polską i Białorusią na wartość przyrodniczą Obiektu Światowego Dziedzictwa „Białowieża Forest”. W tym celu przeanalizowano dane na temat rozmieszczenia wybranych gatunków ssaków w odniesieniu do lokalizacji zapory oraz dane z inwentaryzacji inwazyjnych gatunków roślin w pasie granic...

Border militarization can impede people’s interactions with nature in borderlands. We surveyed one border community to understand how local use of Białowieża Forest, one of Europe’s last primary forest complexes, is affected by militarization. Out of 100 returned surveys, most respondents had a negative view of enforced border security measures (cl...

Linear infrastructure and militarization are increasingly features of Europe’s borderlands. Białowieża Forest (BF) is a transboundary World Heritage site recently militarized and split by a state border barrier. We preliminarily summarize threats based on available evidence and own observations from 2021-2024 using the three One Health targets: peo...

Drawing on a variety of methods including transects, camera traps, and snow-tracking, we report on effects of border infrastructure and militarization on wildlife in Białowieża Forest, a transboundary World Heritage site. Poster was presented at the 7th European Congress of Conservation Biology in July 2024 in Bologna, Italy.

Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species’ population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate ‘intactness scores’: the remaining proportion of...

There is a growing trend of nation states invoking national security and emergency declarations to build state‐sponsored infrastructure projects for border defense, energy production, and transportation. Established laws, regulations, and agreements for the protection of nature and cultural heritage within and between countries are becoming seconda...

One of seven presentations given at a NAWA Urgency Grant funded seminar co-organized by the Białowieża Geobotanical Station of the University of Warsaw Faculty of Biology and the Mammal Research Institute Polish Academy of Sciences in September 2023.

Given the enormous global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Canada, and manifold other zoonotic pathogen activity, there is a pressing need for a deeper understanding of the human-animal-environment interface and the intersecting biological, ecological, and societal factors contributing to the emerge...

As the number of observations submitted to the citizen science platform iNaturalist continues to grow, it is increasingly important that these observations can be identified to the finest taxonomic level, maximizing their value for biodiversity research. Here, we explore the benefits of acting as an identifier on iNaturalist.

Using camera traps and direct observations, we recorded interactions between three species of giant sengi ( Rhynchocyon sp.) and two insectivorous bird species from six forests in Tanzania. In all instances, the birds closely followed the giant sengis who were moving and foraging in the leaf litter. Given that the two bird species are insectivorous...

The lives lost and economic costs of viral zoonotic pandemics have steadily increased over the past century. Prominent policymakers have promoted plans that argue the best ways to address future pandemic catastrophes should entail, “detecting and containing emerging zoonotic threats.” In other words, we should take actions only after humans get sic...

Globally, more than 32,000 kilometers of barriers have been built at borders of over 70 countries, to stop human migration. Governments focus on securing their borders, often forgetting the impacts of such installations on nature and biodiversity. Studies of the effects of fencing policies are scarce, but evidence very high effectiveness of border...

Women continue to be underrepresented and less visible in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). 500 Women Scientists created and launched in January 2018 a global (>140 countries to date), online, open-access directory of women in STEMM fields. This directory—recently renamed gage—now also includes gende...

This report is intended to introduce One Health and serve as a working document to be adapted as an environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO) or other entity develops their inclusion and practice of One Health. Yukon ENGOs work on wildlife, land use planning, mining and energy issues, and One Health—a holistic approach—is intended to impro...

Participatory approaches, such as community photography, can engage the public in questions of societal and scientific interest while helping advance understanding of ecological patterns and processes. We combined data extracted from community‐sourced, spatially explicit photographs with research findings from 2018 fieldwork in the Yukon, Canada, t...

Conservationists don’t always agree about the best ways to reinforce the protection of nature. Debates about it can become confrontational. But at the heart of the issue is how to include more people in conservation efforts. As a group of scientists, we believe it is important to steer the discussion towards a more diverse and inclusive blueprint...

Research suggests that wild animals in urban areas exhibit heightened behavioral flexibility when they encounter novel human-made objects, but most such studies compared responses in urban populations with those from disjunct populations in less disturbed environments. We therefore know little about intrapopulation variation in cognitive or behavio...

The USA is the largest consumer of legally, internationally-traded wildlife. A proportion of this trade consists of species listed in the Appendices of CITES, and recorded in the CITES Trade Database. Using this resource, we quantified wildlife entering the USA for 82 of the most frequently recorded wildlife products and a range of taxonomic groups...

A global online register of women scientists, ready to share their science, was established by a cohort of volunteer women from the grassroots organization 500 Women Scientists on January 17th, 2018. In less than one year, the database “Request a Woman Scientist” comprised over 7,500 women from 174 scientific disciplines and 133 countries. The data...

https://www.docdroid.net/ebFZGRJ/mountaingoats-klondikehighway-report-for-wcs-canada-feb-19-2019.pdf

In April 2018, the Mountain Goat Molt Project was initiated through a series of collaborations across multiple institutions to examine the patterns and phenology of mountain goats’ winter coat molt in relation to warming. Amassing a sample of over 500 photographs – 72% of them crowd-sourced from citizen scientists (non-researchers) from across moun...

Non-lethal mitigation of crop use by elephants Loxodonta africana is an increasingly important part of protected area management across Africa and Asia. Recently, beehive fences have been suggested as a potential mitigation strategy. We tested the effectiveness of this method in a farming community adjacent to Udzungwa Mountains National Park in so...

The world's biodiversity is shared by countries that are increasingly recognizing the need for effective responses to human influence and climate change impacts through coordinated management and protection of nature beyond national borders. The case of elephants, a highly mobile and widely distributed mammal that plays crucial ecological and econo...

Wild species use habitats that vary in risk across space and time. This risk can derive from natural predators and also from direct and indirect human pressures. A starving forager will often take risks that a less hungry forager would not. At a highly seasonal and human-modified site, we predicted that arboreal samango monkeys (Cercopithecus albog...

Understanding how threatened species adapt their behavior to landscapes shaped by humans is increasingly important to ensuring they persist in a changing world. Matrix habitats can be shared spaces where human and nonhuman primates coexist. We set out to determine how an endemic, threatened forest specialist, the frugivorous, arboreal samango monke...

Crop losses from elephants are one of the primary obstacles to the coexistence of elephants and people and one of the contributing causes to elephant population decline. Understanding if some individuals in an elephant population are more likely to forage on crops, and the temporal patterns of elephant visits to farms, is key to mitigating the nega...

A fundamental step in the management and conservation of wild species is advancing our understanding of how animals perceive and use their habitat. Spatial variation in risk either from natural predation or human disturbance generates a “landscape of fear” that can be measured and assessed using experimental patch approaches such as giving-up densi...

Live-capture of animals is a widely used technique in ecological research, and previously trapped individuals often respond to traps with either attraction or avoidance. The effects of trapping on animals’ risk perception are not often studied, although nonlethal effects of risk can significantly influence animals’ behavior and distribution. We use...

Dyadic social relations are known to exhibit homophily − attraction and bonding between similar individuals − and recent studies have detected homophily also on the social network level. Here, we investigate whether social media networks exhibit signs of homophily with regards to life stages. Using a large and global database (N = 111,863) of socia...

https://theamericanscholar.org/south-africa-rhinos-under-the-gun/

These giving-up density experiments were run between May and August 2013 (Lajuma) and May and July 2014 (Hogsback).

Roads in East Africa present unique challenges to wildlife conservation because reserves are largely unfenced and biodiversity is high. Few roads in the region carry high-speed, high-volume traffic, but this is changing rapidly. This chapter reviews existing research on the impact of roads on East African wildlife, research needs and mitigation str...

Humans and human infrastructure are known to alter the relationship between predators and prey, typically by directly or indirectly shielding one of the species from the other. In addition to these overt changes to animals’ behavior, observers may have more subtle impacts on animals’ foraging decisions. However, the anthropogenic alteration of risk...

We censused two discrete subpopulations of the endangered Zanzibar red colobus (Procolobus kirkii) and sympatric Sykes's monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis albogularis) between February 2004 and September 2005 in two coastal forests in Zanzibar, including the northernmost (Kiwengwa-Pongwe Forest) and some of the southernmost (Uzi and Vundwe Islands) exte...

Background Early and accurate diagnosis of febrile patients is essential to treat uncomplicated malaria cases properly, prevent severe malaria, and avert unnecessary anti-malarial treatments. Improper use of anti-malarials increases the risk of adverse drug reaction and the evolution of drug/parasite resistance. While microscopy is the most common...

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/1800368/elephants_are_not_diamonds.html

Priority Primate Areas are identified in Tanzania, mainland Africa's most important country for conservation of primates, on the basis of occupancy by globally rare, Red-Listed and range-restricted primate species and subspecies. We provide a comprehensive list and regional assessment of Tanzania's primate taxa, using IUCN Red List criteria, as wel...

Executive Summary Ruvu South is one of the most important coastal forests in Tanzania. It is a large forest (320km2) relative to other coastal forest fragments in Tanzania (most of which measure less than 20km2). It lies 45km west of Dar es Salaam and is therefore under constant pressure from the illegal production of charcoal to supply the city’s...

An increasing number of field studies on behavioral adaptations and learning suggest that a capacity for flexibility in local responses to disturbance could buffer some so-called specialists against that disturbance. We discuss how specialization, rather than an intrinsic species trait, appears to be moderated by flexible and learned behavior and m...

The increasing size of the human ecological footprint will require a matching increase in conservation efforts if significant, viable communities of nonvoting species are to have any real chance of persisting in natural forms where they can evolve and provide vital services to the human economy, health, and wellbeing. Conservation biology, one of t...

SHOULD CONSERVATION TARGETS, such as the proportion of a region to be placed in protected areas, be socially acceptable from the start? Or should they be based unapologetically on the best available science and expert opinion, then address issues of practicality later? Such questions strike to the philosophical core of conservation. Ambitious targe...

Swamp forests may be important refuges for primates and felids where these taxa are threatened with habitat loss. Mangrove and peat swamp forests, impenetrable, wet habitats, inaccessible and uninhabitable for humans, may, in some regions, be the most significant remaining habitats for threatened species. They are nevertheless neglected in field st...

Cycads and colobus monkeys occur together in many parts of tropical Africa; we present the first records of colobus feeding on these plants. On 22 occasions, the Endangered Zanzibar red colobus Procolobus kirkii fed on the leaves of Encephalartos hildebrandtii, a Near Threatened species, in the Kiwengwa-Pongwe Forest Reserve, north-eastern Unguja....

More than half of the global population of the endangered Zanzibar red colobus (Procolobus kirkii) live outside the single major protected area on Zanzibar Island. We present data on the 2 largest, discrete subpopulations living in unprotected areas at extremes of the species’ range. We compare the size and structure of 11 groups, specifically 6 co...

Walker and Stiles argue that elephant populations are not declining. The facts say otherwise. Loxodonta africana numbers have plummeted by more than 50% continent-wide in the past 40 years, a reduction now compounded by increases in range loss, conflict with humans, and resurgence in poaching ([ 1

Tanzania and Zambia are petitioning the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to “downlist” the conservation status of their elephants to allow sale of stockpiled ivory. But just 2 years after CITES placed a 9-year moratorium on future ivory sales (1), elephant poaching is on the rise. The petitioning countries are major s...

Savannah elephants make extensive use of montane forest in three Tanzanian massifs, including the highly biodiverse Udzungwa Mountains. We have begun the first study of the Udzungwa elephant population, which is perceived to be increasing and is compressed due to loss of connectivity with adjacent protected areas. Meanwhile, human-elephant conflict...

We investigated the role of geographical insularity in divergence and speciation of Procolobus kirkii by examining cranial morphology. The sample (n = 369) included museum specimens of Procolobus spp. and recently deceased individuals of P. kirkii from the main island of Zanzibar and 2 smaller islands in the archipelago. Geometric morphometrics evi...

Isolated populations of Procolobus kirkii on Uzi Island, Zanzibar, use Rhizophora mucronata-dominated mangrove forest for refuge. Three groups, observed over 14 months, spent up to 85% of total observation time in mangroves with brief excursions to adjacent upland coral rag forest, habitat degraded by human cutting. A large proportion of monkeys' d...

Specialization is considered to be the major correlate of extinction risk in primates; however, rather than trying to identify the traits that predispose species to extinction, studying populations that survive episodes of chronic biological impoverishment provides a new perspective. Field studies on behavioural adaptations and learning suggest tha...