Louis Phipps

Independent Researcher

Published in Sandgrouse

Partial migration is one of the most widespread migratory strategies among taxa. Investigating the trade-off between environmental/social factors — fitness and energetic consequences — is essential to understand the coexistence of migratory and resident behaviours. Here, we compiled field monitoring data of wintering population size and telemetry d...

Wind turbines and power lines can cause bird mortality due to collision or electrocution. The biodiversity impacts of energy infrastructure (EI) can be minimised through effective landscape‐scale planning and mitigation. The identification of high‐vulnerability areas is urgently needed to assess potential cumulative impacts of EI while supporting t...

Protected areas are intended as tools in reducing threats to wildlife and preserving habitat for their long-term population persistence. Studies on ranging behavior provide insight into the utility of protected areas. Vultures are one of the fastest declining groups of birds globally and are popular subjects for telemetry studies, but continent-wid...

Partial migration is one of the most widespread migratory strategies among taxa. Investigating the trade-off between environmental/social factors - fitness and energetic consequences – is essential to understand the coexistence of migratory and resident behaviours. Here, we compiled field monitoring data of wintering population size and telemetry d...

African vulture populations are rapidly declining, yet funding and other resources available for their conservation are limited. Improving our understanding of which African vulture species could best serve as an umbrella species for the entire suite of African vultures could help conservationists save time, money, and resources by focusing their e...

Although vulture feeding stations are a widely used tool for vulture conservation in many regions worldwide, there has been some confusion about their functions and this is reflected in the range of terminology used. The origin of food supply at provisioning sites (both for in situ and ex situ situations) and the goals of feeding station managers (...

Most raptor populations are declining and nearly a fifth are threatened with extinction; thus there is a need to increase collaboration to ensure efficient and effective research, management, and conservation. Here, we introduce the Global Raptor Impact Network (GRIN; www.globalraptors.org), a tool to enhance collaboration and conservation impact o...

Birds striking aircrafts cause substantial economic loss world‐wide and, more worryingly, human and wildlife fatalities. Designing effective measures to mitigate fatal bird strikes requires an in‐depth knowledge of the characteristics of this incident type and the flight behaviours of the bird species involved. The characteristics of bird strikes i...

Long‐distance migrations are among the most physically demanding feats animals perform. Understanding the potential costs and benefits of such behaviour is a fundamental question in ecology and evolution. A hypothetical cost of migration should be outweighed by higher productivity and/or higher annual survival, but few studies on migratory species...

Disentangling individual- and population-level variation in migratory movements is necessary for understanding migration at the species level. However, very few studies have analyzed these patterns across large portions of species' distributions. We compiled a large telemetry dataset on the globally endangered Egyptian Vulture Neophron percnopterus...

The Global South harbors a large share of imperiled biodiversity. Effective research and conservation in the Global South are negatively affected by weak or turbulent socio-political contexts, such as poor governance and/or high violence levels. There is a need to understand how priorities for research and conservation relate to different levels of...

We report an observation of a group of 30 Egyptian Vultures Neophron percnopterus at the Boundou Community Nature Reserve, eastern Senegal, on 26 Nov 2017. This is the largest group of Egyptian Vultures ever documented in Senegal and The Gambia and one of the largest known from the Sahel. The Egyptian Vulture is suffering a severe decline across mu...

Vulture restaurants are used worldwide as a conservation tool to provide threatened vultures with a source of supplementary carrion free from anthropogenic contaminants such as poisons and veterinary drugs. While the impacts of supplementary feeding sites on ecosystem and scavenging community dynamics have been investigated in Europe, no informatio...

[This corrects the article on p. e76794 in vol. 8.].

Cape vulture Gyps coprotheres populations have declined across their range due to multiple anthropogenic threats. Their susceptibility to fatal collisions with the expanding power line network and the prevalence of carcasses contaminated with illegal poisons and other threats outside protected areas are thought to be the primary drivers of declines...

Interactions between apex and mesopredators and their impacts on prey populations have been well documented, while the influence of apex predators such as lions on carrion availability and the subsequent impacts at lower trophic levels are not fully understood. Here we assess dietary overlap between two sympatric carnivores (brown hyaena, Parahyaen...

Vultures in the Gyps genus are declining globally. Multiple threats related to human activity have caused widespread declines of vulture populations in Africa, especially outside protected areas. Addressing such threats requires the estimation of foraging ranges yet such estimates are lacking, even for widespread (but declining) species such as the...

Ivlev's electivity index values for protected (PA) and unprotected (Non-PA) areas for five immature African white-backed vultures at the (A) overall and (B) core foraging range scales. Availability was represented by the relative proportions of protected and unprotected areas in each vulture's 95% KDE contour. At the overall foraging range scale (A...

Foraging range area curves from incremental area analysis of GPS locations from six immature African white-backed vultures. The number of GPS locations used to generate MCPs by adding consecutive locations until all locations were used is plotted against the area of each MCP. (A) – (F) represent different vultures. (TIF)