Liam Bailey

Liam Bailey
Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research · Department of Evolutionary Genetics

BEnvSc

About

34
Publications
11,815
Reads
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1,269
Citations
Introduction
I'm an ecologist interested in measuring and understanding human impacts on natural systems. I currently focus on climate change and extreme climatic events.
Additional affiliations
February 2013 - present
Australian National University
Position
  • PhD Student

Publications

Publications (34)
Article
Full-text available
Ecologists and many evolutionary biologists relate the variation in physiological, behavioural, life‐history, demographic, population and community traits to the variation in weather, a key environmental driver. However, identifying which weather variables (e.g. rain, temperature, El Niño index), over which time period (e.g. recent weather, spring...
Article
Full-text available
Sea-level rise will lead to widespread habitat loss if warming exceeds 2 °C, threatening coastal wildlife globally. Reductions in coastal habitat quality are also expected but their impact and timing are unclear. Here we combine four decades of field data with models of sea-level rise, coastal geomorphology, adaptive behaviour and population dynami...
Preprint
Full-text available
In conservation, a growing population is often taken as a sign of success. But trends in population size can be misleading. When individuals are long-lived, populations may keep growing---for a time---even as the environment begins to stabilize or deteriorate. Trends in carrying capacity (K) would better reflect the situation that a population find...
Article
Full-text available
Anthropogenic activity can have substantial effects on wildlife. These effects may vary according to the characteristics of the activity and the species involved. Although effects on behaviour are well studied, studies of effects on fitness and physiology are scarce, particularly for group‐living species. We exploited a natural experimental setup t...
Article
Full-text available
The acute phase response (APR) is an evolutionarily well-conserved part of the innate immune defense against pathogens. However, recent studies in bats yielded surprisingly diverse results compared to previous APR studies on both vertebrate and invertebrate species. This is especially interesting due to the known role of bats as reservoirs for viru...
Poster
Full-text available
SPI-Birds Network and Database (https://spibirds.org) is a community-driven initiative that connects researchers working on populations of individually marked birds, and aims at increasing the visibility of long-term individual-based bird data and facilitating data sharing and re-use. Since its launch in 2019, SPI-Birds has collated (meta)data of 2...
Article
The rate of adaptive evolution, the contribution of selection to genetic changes that increase mean fitness, is determined by the additive genetic variance in individual relative fitness. To date, there are few robust estimates of this parameter for natural populations, and it is therefore unclear whether adaptive evolution can play a meaningful ro...
Article
Full-text available
The phenology of many species shows strong sensitivity to climate change; however, with few large scale intra-specific studies it is unclear how such sensitivity varies over a species’ range. We document large intra-specific variation in phenological sensitivity to temperature using laying date information from 67 populations of two co-familial Eur...
Article
Full-text available
Large numbers of bats are killed by wind turbines globally, yet the specific demographic consequences of wind turbine mortality are still unclear. In this study, we compared characteristics of Nathusius' pipistrelles (Pipistrellus nathusii) killed at wind turbines (N = 119) to those observed within the live population (N = 524) during the summer mi...
Article
Full-text available
Aim In many species, density‐dependent effects on reproduction are an important driver of population dynamics. However, it is rarely considered that the direction of density dependence is expected to vary over space and time depending on anti‐predator behaviour and predator community. Aggregation may allow for effective group mobbing against avian...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the causes of range expansions in abundant species can help predict future species distributions. During range expansions, animals are exposed to novel environments and are required to cope with new and unpredictable stressors. Glucocorticoids (GCs) are mediators of the hormonal and behavioural mechanisms allowing animals to cope with...
Article
Full-text available
RATIONALE Identifying migratory corridors of animals is essential for their effective protection, yet the exact location of such corridors is often unknown, particularly for elusive animals such as bats. While migrating along the German coastline, Nathusius’ pipistrelles (Pipistrellus nathusii) are regularly killed at wind turbines. Therefore, we e...
Article
Full-text available
The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long‐term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild...
Preprint
Full-text available
The phenology of many species shows strong sensitivity to climate change; however, with few large scale intra-specific studies it is unclear how such sensitivity varies over a species' range. We document large intra-specific variation in phenological sensitivity to temperature using laying date information from 67 populations of two European songbi...
Preprint
The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long-term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild...
Article
For the preservation of endangered felid species, epididymal sperm may be received from valuable individuals after castration or death and they need to be cryopreserved for storage. However, pregnancy rates with epididymal or cryopreserved sperm are lower than with ejaculated and non-frozen semen even if insemination is surgically performed into th...
Article
Aim Declining animal body size has been proposed as a general response to increasing global temperatures that should be observed across a broad biogeographical scale. However, published studies have shown large variation in both the magnitude and direction of body size trends. We aim to investigate how the way body size is measured (body mass, stru...
Article
Full-text available
The current study aimed to isolate, culture and characterize small (SLC) and large (LLC) steroidogenic cells from the corpora lutea (CL) of non-pregnant domestic cats. Isolation of feline SLC was based on an enzymatic digestion of luteal tissue, whereas LLC were obtained by mechanical disruption of CL. To assess function of both cell types, progest...
Article
Full-text available
The measurement of hair cortisol is increasingly used to understand the effect of natural and anthropogenic stressors on wild animals, but it is potentially confounded by individual, seasonal and sex-dependant variations in baseline cortisol secretion. This study validated an enzyme-linked immunoassay for hair cortisol measurement and characterized...
Chapter
To understand the effects of climate change and predict its future impacts, biologists relate variation in biological variables to spatial or temporal variation in weather variables. It is often unclear a priori which weather variables are important, over which period they act, and in what way they affect biological responses. Recently, multiple me...
Article
The white-tailed sea eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) is known to be sensitive to disturbance. To better understand potential stressors, we measured corticosterone metabolite levels in H. albicilla excreta and recorded the nest success of breeding pairs. We tested the ability of four enzyme immunoassays (EIA) to measure urinary glucocorticoid metabolit...
Article
Full-text available
Changes in the frequency of extreme climatic events (ECEs) can have profound impacts on individual fitness by degrading habitat quality. Organisms may respond to such changes through habitat selection, favouring those areas less affected by ECEs; however, documenting habitat selection in response to ECEs is difficult in the wild due to the rarity o...
Poster
Full-text available
This work explores the degree of spatial synchrony in three fitness-related traits of three hole-nesting passerine species. Spatial synchrony is correlated fluctuations in a property (e.g., population size, vital rates, trait values) among spatially distinct populations.
Article
Full-text available
Phenotypic plasticity is a crucial mechanism for responding to changes in climatic means, yet we know little about its role in responding to extreme climatic events (ECEs). ECEs may lack the reliable cues necessary for phenotypic plasticity to evolve; however, this has not been empirically tested. We investigated whether behavioural plasticity in n...
Article
Full-text available
Extreme climatic events (ECEs) have a disproportionate effect on ecosystems. Yet much of what we know about the ecological impact of ECEs is based on observing the effects of single extreme events. We examined what characteristics affect the strength of inference that can be drawn from single-event studies, which broadly fell into three categories:...
Article
Full-text available
When studying the impacts of climate change, there is a tendency to select climate data from a small set of arbitrary time periods or climate windows (e.g., spring temperature). However, these arbitrary windows may not encompass the strongest periods of climatic sensitivity and may lead to erroneous biological interpretations. Therefore, there is a...
Article
Full-text available
Natural populations might exhibit resilience to changing climatic conditions if they already show adaptive flexibility in their reproductive strategies. In cooperative breeders, theory predicts that mothers with helpers should provide less care when environmental conditions are favourable, but maintain high investment when conditions are challengin...
Preprint
Full-text available
When studying the impacts of climate change, there is a tendency to select climate data from a small set of arbitrary time periods or climate windows (e.g., spring temperature). However, these arbitrary windows may not encompass the strongest periods of climatic sensitivity and may lead to erroneous biological interpretations. Therefore, there is a...
Thesis
Full-text available
Anthropogenic climate change will not only change mean climatic conditions but is also predicted to alter the patterns of extreme climatic events (ECEs). Changes in the frequency and magnitude of ECEs can have broad impacts; however, empirical work on the topic has been limited. This thesis focuses on ECEs, with chapters one and two discussing the...
Article
Extreme climatic events ( ECE s) are predicted to become more frequent as the climate changes. A rapidly increasing number of studies – though few on animals – suggest that the biological consequences of ECE s can be severe. However, ecological research on the impacts of ECE s has been limited by a lack of cohesiveness and structure. ECE s are ofte...
Article
Species' responses to environmental changes such as global warming are affected not only by trends in mean conditions, but also by natural and human-induced environmental fluctuations. Methods are needed to predict how such environmental variation affects ecological and evolutionary processes, in order to design effective strategies to conserve bio...

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