Marcin ChurskiPolish Academy of Sciences | PAN · Mammal Research Institute
Marcin Churski
PhD
About
47
Publications
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1,944
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
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June 2015 - present
Publications
Publications (47)
Plant biomass consumers (mammalian herbivory and fire) are increasingly seen as major drivers of ecosystem structure and function but the prevailing paradigm in temperate forest ecology is still that their dynamics are mainly bottom-up resource-controlled. Using conceptual advances from savanna ecology, particularly the demographic bottleneck model...
Many medium-sized carnivores are fossorial and use burrow systems to reduce pre-dation risk or avoid predators. But fossorial species cannot stay safely underground forever, and they must also risk emerging overground, to forage and find mates. To make this trade-off effectively and maximize their own fitness, it is imperative they assess how preda...
We analyzed the effect of forest management and wolf (Canis lupus) space-use on diet composition of red deer (Cervus elaphus) and European bison (Bison bonasus) in Białowieża Primeval Forest (BPF), Poland. The red deer is the main prey species for the wolf, whereas the European bison is rarely preyed upon. As both species behave as intermediate fee...
Fire and herbivory are fundamental top‐down processes, structuring grass‐tree ratios in ecosystems across a diversity of climates. Both are plant consumers that can strongly control the recruitment of woody seedlings and saplings to taller height classes. Without consumer control, many grass‐dominated ecosystems would convert into woodlands or fore...
Tree architectures reflect the main abiotic and biotic selection pressures determining tree growth and survival. Studies have shown that trees growing in herbivore‐dominated ecosystems, such as savannas, develop denser, more divaricate ‘cage’‐like architectures in response to chronic browsing pressure (also known as ‘brown‐world’ architectures). In...
Understanding the relationship between a species feeding strategy and its environment (trophic ecology) is critical to assess environmental requirements and improve management policies. However, measuring trophic interactions remains challenging. Among the available methods, quantifying the plant composition of a species' diet indicates how species...
Large carnivores not only supress mesocarnivores via killing and instilling fear, but also facilitate them through carrion provisioning. Hence, mesocarnivores frequently face a trade-off between risk avoidance and food acquisition. Here we used the raccoon dog and red fox in Białowieża Forest, Poland as models for investigating how large carnivores...
There are several mechanisms that allow plants to temporarily escape from top-down control. One of them is trophic cascades triggered by top predators or pathogens. Another is satiation of consumers by mast seeding. These two mechanisms have traditionally been studied in separation. However , their combined action may have a greater effect on plant...
Camera traps are used worldwide to monitor wildlife. Despite the increasing availability of Deep Learning (DL) models, the effective usage of this technology to support wildlife monitoring is limited. This is mainly due to the complexity of DL technology and high computing requirements. This paper presents the implementation of the light-weight and...
Camera traps are used worldwide to monitor wildlife. Despite the increasing availability of Deep Learning (DL) models, the effective usage of this technology to support wildlife monitoring is limited. This is mainly due to the complexity of DL technology and high computing requirements. This paper presents the implementation of the light-weight and...
Impediments, such as tree logs, can prevent access to saplings for deer, and can increase perceived predation risk by blocking view and escape possibilities for deer in areas with large carnivores. Therefore, impediments can influence deer foraging decisions and the trade-off between safety and food of different quality indirectly influencing tree...
Context.
Ungulate prey can use increased vigilance to reduce their risk of predation, but little is known of the combined and interactive risk effects from humans and wolves in determining ungulate behaviour across time and space. Understanding the interplay between these risk effects is increasingly important, considering the recolonisation of sev...
African swine fever (ASF) has been spreading in the Eurasian continent for more than 10 years now. Although the course of ASF in domestic pigs and its negative economic impact on the pork industry are well-known, we still lack a quantitative assessment of the impact of ASF on wild boar (Sus scrofa) populations under natural conditions. Wild boar is...
In Europe brown bears are currently largely confined to mountainous areas and eastern European refugia with sparse human populations. Poland typifies this distribution, with bears being present in the Carpathian Mountains, but absent from the lowlands. Recently large carnivore populations have been recovering throughout Europe, raising the question...
Large herbivores influence ecosystem functioning via their effects on vegetation at different spatial scales. It is often overlooked that the spatial distribution of large herbivores result from their responses to interacting top-down and bottom-up ecological gradients that create landscape-scale variation in the structure of the entire community....
The perception and assessment of predation risk often cause changes in the activities of animals and induce behavioural responses that may in turn affect their movements and distribution. To simulate high predation risk in a midfield pond riparian habitat, we used fresh faeces from ranch American mink Neovison vison and recorded behavioural respons...
The recolonization of wolves in European human-dominated landscapes poses a conservation challenge to protect this species and manage conflicts. The question of how humans can co-exist with large carnivores often triggers strong emotions. Here we provide an objective, science-based discussion on possible management approaches. Using existing knowle...
Pellet counts are widely used to monitor ungulates but rely on the assumption that pellets of different species are correctly identified in the field. Recent studies question this assumption using DNA barcoding techniques to check field identification rates. For Europe, which is undergoing a rapid shift towards more diverse ungulate assemblages, su...
Loggings in biodiversity hot-spots are perceived as very serious threat to forest species and habitats of high conservation interest. In this paper we scrutinize the spatial impacts of recent loggings in the Polish part of the renowned Białowieża Forest being the last remaining area of lowland temperate forest with a primeval character in Europe wi...
Tree cavities are one of the key structures that influence abundance and diversity of cavity-dependent organisms in forests. The natural processes that lead to cavity formation and regulate the abundance of cavities are poorly understood, especially in subtropical regions of Asia. Surveys of tree cavities suitable for breeding birds were conducted...
Ecology and conservation biology have recently become increasingly data intensive, mainly due to technological advances and the growing inter-disciplinary character.
However, a data-intensive science needs specific information infrastructure and tools to efficiently manage, integrate, share and (re)use massive amounts of data. An open source softwa...
Functional plant traits often express consistent changes along ecological gradients and, hence, are often used as indicators of environmental change (e.g. nutrient availability, temperature changes). Besides being driven by edaphic conditions, functional plant composition is filtered by herbivory and traits responsive to nutrient availability, whic...
Predation is a major selective pressure for prey; however, the stress response to predation risk and the relative importance of natural versus anthropogenic stress factors in wild populations of animals have rarely been studied. We investigated the level of fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (FGMs) in 6 populations of red deer and roe deer exposed to...
Dorresteijn et al . [[1][1]] recently addressed the question what influence humans have on predator–prey interactions in human-modified landscapes. Their study follows increasing evidence from relatively natural landscapes that large carnivores are central drivers of ecosystem structure and
Tree cavities are important structural elements of forest ecosystem that host numerous birds, mammals and other cavity-dependent organisms. Pattern of cavity distribution in temperate and boreal forests are relatively well studied, yet little is known about cavities in tropical and subtropical forests. We compared cavity availability in relation to...
Camera trapping is increasingly becoming an important tool in ecological research. However, the organization of large collections of multimedia files and especially efficient searching for subsets of data is a challenging task. While the development of project-specific software solutions is dominating in the camera trapping community, little attent...
There is a growing evidence that members of animal groups synchronize their vigilance behavior to minimize predation risk.
Because synchronized vigilance deviates from the classical vigilance models, which assume independent scanning, it is important
to understand when and why it occurs. We explored vigilance behavior of wild boar (Sus scrofa) in a...
Climate changes also affect European forests. Some species of trees, like Norway spruce Picea abies, are sensitive to high temperatures and water deficiency. After having been weakened by summer droughts they become vulnerable to more intensive colonization of tree-eating insects. Spruce trees which become infested by the European spruce bark beetl...
Large mammalian carnivores create areas perceived as having high and low risk by their ungulate prey. Human activities can
indirectly shape this landscape of fear by altering behavior and spatial distribution of carnivores. We studied how red deer
perceive the landscape of fear in an old-growth forest system (Białowieża Primeval Forest, Poland) bot...
As researchers try to predict the effects of human modification at all trophic levels and mediate the impact of rapid environmental change, it has become clear it is no longer a matter of agreeing that both bottom-up and top-down forces play important roles in diverse ecosystems. Rather, the question is: how do these forces interact across aquatic...
Anti-predator responses by ungulates can be based on habitat features or on the near-imminent threat of predators. In dense forest, cues that ungulates use to assess predation risk likely differ from half-open landscapes, as scent relative to sight is predicted to be more important. We studied, in the Białowieża Primeval Forest (Poland), whether pe...
Research on moose-mediated seed dispersal is limited. However, its potential role in transferring seeds in patchy landscapes may be of great importance. In this work we examined how seasons and vegetation diversity influence the species richness and abundance of seeds dispersed endozoochorically by moose. Samples of moose faeces were collected year...
Large carnivores can either directly infuence ungulate populations or indirectly afect their behaviour. Knowledge from European systems, in contrast to North American systems, on how this might lead to cascading efects on lower trophic levels is virtually absent. We studied whether wolves Canis lupus via density-mediated and behaviorally-mediated e...
In forested ecosystems, oak saplings can be found in association with coarse woody debris (CWD) that offers protection against herbivore browsing. In this study we investigated whether CWD is already a safe site during the earlier stages of oak recruitment, i.e. at the seed and seedling phase, or whether these phases require different micro-environ...
1. There is a growing theoretical basis for the role of predation risk as a driver of trophic
interactions, conceptualized as the ‘ecology of fear’. However, current ungulate management
ignores the role of nonlethal risk effects of predation.
2. We introduce the concept of ‘hunting for fear’ as an extension of the more classical ‘hunting
to kill’ t...
Question: What are the main driving factors in 70 years of natural dynamics in tree recruitment in the Białowieża National Park?Location: Białowieża National Park, Poland, is one of the least disturbed temperate, lowland forest systems in Europe.Methods: We tested whether fluctuations in large herbivore populations, changes in climate and openness...
1. Fires are nowadays small, yet frequent, in temperate Central European conifer forests, but little is known about the fire history in this region. This is likely due to the lack of intact forests that contain old trees and dead wood from which fire history may be reconstructed. An exception is the Białowieża Primeval Forest (BPF) in Poland for wh...
1. We tested the interactions between biotic and abiotic factors in structuring temperate forest communities by comparing tree recruitment after 7 years inside 30 pairs of exclosure (excluding ungulates: red deer, roe deer, bison, moose, wild boar) and control plots (7 × 7 m each) in one of the most natural forest systems in Europe, the Białowieża...
1. We tested the interactions between biotic and abiotic factors in structuring temperate forest communities
by comparing tree recruitment after 7 years inside 30 pairs of exclosure (excluding ungulates:
red deer, roe deer, bison, moose, wild boar) and control plots (7 · 7 m each) in one of the
most natural forest systems in Europe, the Białowie_za...
Ungulate populations across Europe have been strongly increasing over the past decades.
Simultaneously with this increase, concerns about the impact of ungulates on forest systems, and
forestry specifically, are increasing. In this study we discuss how the common forestry practice of
creating clear cuts in relatively homogenous, managed forests may...
Questions: What factors limit the distribution of epiphytic lichens and bryophytes at plot and tree level in beech forests? At what ages do epiphytic species, and species of conservation concern in particular, occur along a chronosequence of beech?
Location: South-west Sweden.
Method: Five hundred and seventy-one age-determined trees from 37 plots...
Present status of a postglacial relict - Salix myrtilloides L. was investigated in north central Poland at 27 localities. Consequently 3 sites were confirmed, 4 were not confirmed, and the remaining 20 were considered to be extinct. In comparison to the historical distribution, ca. 74% of the sites existing 50 years ago do not exist today in the st...
Based on survey of PhD training coordinators, the paper examines the status of doctoral education at universities dealing with higher forest education in the Baltic Sea region. The primary attention is given to intensive courses and possibilities for joint international training. In total, the survey found around 450 PhD students. In 2005, 39 inten...
Aim The dominant forces behind the expansion of Fagus sylvatica (beech) in northern Europe during the late Holocene have been much debated. Palaeoecological analyses were performed for a biodiversity hotspot reserve in order to study the processes behind the local establishment of Fagus, as well as the historical vegetational development in relatio...
Projects
Projects (5)
The aim of this project is to investigate the impact of the risk associated with the presence of large carnivores (wolves and lynx) and the potential stress it causes in their ungulate prey (red deer and roe deer) on the functioning of a temperate forest ecosystem.
We hypothesize that if predation stress induced by large carnivores has a significant effect on the physiology of their prey, it should have a measurable effect on the stoichiometric composition i.e. the proportional share of carbon and nitrogen at different trophic levels of the ecosystem.
The wolf expansion into human-dominated areas in Europe creates a new conservation challenge of how to protect this species and manage human-wolf conflicts. Attraction of wolves to anthropogenic food in these areas in combination with a mild human response to wolves (prohibition of wolf hunting) could lead to selection for less fearful, ‘tamer’, wolves. When wolves are losing their fear of humans it may also change their ecological role. In this project we set the following research goals: 1) Determine to what extent wolves are losing their fear of humans in Europe Europe (more information here, 2) Assess the consequences of changes in wolf behaviour for their ecological impact.
