Marco Heurich

• Professor
• Professor at University of Freiburg

Background and aims Deadwood plays a vital role in forest ecosystems, influencing soil biodiversity through nutrient enrichment and niche partitioning. While the effects of specific attributes of deadwood logs on soil biodiversity are well studied, it remains unclear whether and how the volume of deadwood affects soil biodiversity at the scale of f...

This comprehensive chapter covers various aspects of the biology and natural history of the Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus), including names, taxonomy, subspecies and distribution, descriptive notes, habitat, movements and home range, activity patterns, feeding ecology, reproduction, growth and survival, behavior, status in the wild and in captivity...

Habitat fragmentation and loss globally threatens biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Fragmentation disrupts gene flow and isolates populations, endangering species persistence. Dispersal ability is critical for species to maintain gene flow among populations and colonising new habitats. However, most species' dispersal abilities are unknown, r...

Persistence of populations may be uncertain for large carnivore species, especially for those established in human-dominated landscapes. Here, we studied the Eurasian lynx in Western Europe established in the Upper Rhine meta-population (i.e., Jura, Vosges-Palatinian and Black Forest populations) and the Alpine population. These populations are cur...

Contraception has traditionally been used on domesticated and captive animals, but it has also found increasing application in locally overabundant wildlife species. Different immunocontraceptives are available and they vary in their mechanisms, effectiveness, and potential side effects. In this study, the porcine zona pellicula (pZP)-based vaccine...

Der Nationalpark (NLP) Bayerischer Wald und der tschechische NLP umava, die gemeinsam das größte zusammenhängende streng geschützte Waldgebiet Mitteleuropas bilden, sind seit Anfang der 1990er-Jahre von Massenvermehrungen von Borkenkäfern betroffen. Die damit verbundenen Totholzflächen prägen das Waldbild und die Wahrnehmung der Besucherinnen und B...

The bilateral asymmetry of flanks, where the sides of an animal with unique visual markings are independently patterned, complicates tasks such as individual identification. Automatically generating additional information on the visible side of the animal would improve the accuracy of individual identification. In this study, we used transfer learn...

Effective conservation of large mammals depends on how people perceive them. Grey wolves have a widespread distribution globally, and their recent recolonization of human-dominated landscapes offers an excellent opportunity to understand the heterogeneity in their perception across continents. Our analysis included all quantitative studies (118 art...

Global Roadkill Data: a dataset on terrestrial vertebrate mortality caused by collision with vehicles (Supplementary information)

Roadkill is widely recognized as one of the primary negative effects of roads on many wildlife species and also has socioeconomic impacts when they result in accidents. A comprehensive dataset of roadkill locations is essential to evaluate the factors contributing to roadkill risk and to enhance our comprehension of its impact on wildlife populatio...

Fungi represent a significant portion of Earth's biological diversity and are essential for ecosystem functions like organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling. While fungi associated with plant roots have been extensively studied, our understanding of fungi in the forest canopies remains limited. To investigate the landscape-scale variation...

In Europe, red deer (Cervus elaphus) act as an important link in the life cycle of generalist ticks, and their abundance as hosts can influence both tick density as well as the prevalence of certain tick-borne pathogens. The presence of their main predator, grey wolves (Canis lupus), have been shown to alter the spatial behavior of deer, and the mo...

We present an overview of wildlife-vehicle collision (WVC) liability covering 36 European countries. We reviewed approaches to WVC liability which are currently in effect across Europe and their potential consequences for WVC reporting. To obtain relevant information, we conducted a survey, including a web-based questionnaire. We retrieved answers...

The life of large herbivores also includes death. While it marks the end of existence for an individual, the carcass serves as the foundation for new life: A highly diverse community of decomposers, engaged in complex interactions, colonizes the dead body and returns its components to the ecosystem.

Survival and cause‐specific mortality rates are vital for evidence‐based population forecasting and conservation, particularly for large carnivores, whose populations are often vulnerable to human‐caused mortalities. It is therefore important to know the relationship between anthropogenic and natural mortality causes to evaluate whether they are ad...

Old-growth forests are essential for maintaining biodiversity, as they are formed by the complexity of diverse forest structures, such as broad variations in tree height and diameter (DBH) and conditions of living and dead trees, leading to various ecological niches. However, many efforts of old-growth forest mapping from LiDAR have targeted only o...

Deforestation of tropical forests have resulted in extensive areas of secondary forests with the potential to restore biodiversity to former old-­ growth forest levels. The recovery of vertebrate communities is an essential component of biodiversity and ecosystem restoration, as vertebrates provide key ecosystem functions. However, little is known...

Ashworthius sidemi is a nematode characteristic for cervids native to the mainland of eastern Asia like particular subspecies of sika deer (Cervus nippon) including Dybowski’s sika deer (C. n. hortulorum). With the translocation of so-called ʻmainlandʼ sika deer and/or Maral deer (C. canadensis sibiricus) that had previously been kept with Dybowski...

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...

The Congo Basin tropical forests are home to many endemic and endangered species, and a global hotspot for forest fragmentation and loss. Yet, little has been done to document the region’s rapid deforestation, assess its effects and consequences, or project future forest cover loss to aid in effective planning. Here we applied the Random Forest (RF...

The estimation of foraging parameters is fundamental for understanding predator ecology. Predation and feeding can vary with multiple factors, such as prey availability, presence of kleptoparasites and human disturbance. However, our knowledge is mostly limited to local scales, which prevents studying effects of environmental factors across larger...

Central European mountains, including the Š umava Mountains located along the Czechia/Germany border, have a long and rich anthropogenic history. Yet, documenting prehistoric human impact in Central European mountain environments remains a challenge because of the need to disentangle climate and human-caused responses in terrestrial systems. Here,...

The projected rise in fire activity due to climate change challenges forest conservation efforts worldwide. Current non-intervention approaches, which rely on natural processes for ecosystem conservation, often overlook palaeoecological data depicting long-term, local interactions between fire regime components, forest structure and composition, so...

Understanding predator-prey interactions, particularly how species use space and time to influence encounter rates, is crucial in ecology. Camera traps, while not being able to directly measure encounters of large free-roaming species, can help estimating how species tolerate or avoid proximity with eachother. We used data from a one-year study in...

Ungulate populations can exhibit various growth patterns, which are influenced by factors such as predation and resource availability. Favourable environments can lead to irruptive growth, resulting in resource depletion. However, additional pressures from predation, and hunting can potentially impact population development leading to declines or e...

Invasive parasites that expand their natural range can be a threat to wildlife biodiversity and may pose a health risk to non-adapted, naive host species. The invasive giant liver fluke, Fascioloides magna, native to North America, has extended its range in Europe and uses mainly red deer (Cervus elaphus) as definitive hosts. The penetration of the...

Excessive tree mortality is a global concern and remains poorly understood as it is a complex phenomenon. We lack global and temporally continuous coverage on tree mortality data. Ground-based observations on tree mortality, e.g., derived from national inventories, are very sparse, not standardized and not spatially explicit. Earth observation data...

Instance segmentation is a core computer vision task with great practical significance. Recent advances, driven by large-scale benchmark datasets, have yielded good general-purpose Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based methods. Natural Resource Monitoring (NRM) utilizes remote sensing imagery with generally known scale and containing multiple ov...

We present the GLOBAL ROADKILL DATA, the largest worldwide compilation of roadkill data on terrestrial vertebrates. We outline the workflow (Fig. 1) to illustrate the sequential steps of the study, in which we merged local-scale survey datasets and opportunistic records into a unified roadkill large dataset comprising 208,570 roadkill records. Thes...

Wildlife tagging provides critical insights into animal movement ecology, physiology, and behavior amid global ecosystem changes. However, the stress induced by capture, handling, and tagging can impact post-release locomotion and activity and, consequently, the interpretation of study results. Here, we analyze post-tagging effects on 1585 individu...

Resource availability and habitat heterogeneity are essential drivers of biodiversity, but their individual roles often remain unclear since both factors are often correlated. Here, we tested the more-individuals hypothesis (MIH) and the habitat-heterogeneity hypothesis (HHH) for bacteria, fungi, dipterans, coleopterans, birds, and mammals on 100 e...

Silphinae (Staphylinidae; carrion beetles) are important contributors to the efficient decomposition and recycling of carrion necromass. Their community composition is important for the provision of this ecosystem function and can be affected by abiotic and biotic factors. However, investigations are lacking on the effects of carrion characteristic...

Old-growth forests are essential to preserve biodiversity and play an important role in sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change. However, their existence across Europe is vulnerable due to the scarcity of their distribution, logging, and environmental threats. Therefore, providing the current status of old-growth forests across Europe is...

Effective forest management is essential for mitigating climate change effects. This is why understanding forest growth dynamics is critical for its sustainable management. Thus, characterizing forest plot deadwood levels is vital for understanding forest dynamics, and for assessments of biomass, carbon stock, and biodiversity. For the first time,...

Digitale Informationsmedien wie Outdoorplattformen (oft auch als Outdoor-Apps bezeichnet) bieten eine unmittelbare Kommunikations- und Interaktionsmöglichkeit mit Naturbesucherinnen und -besuchern. Dies birgt Potenziale, aber auch neue Herausforderungen für den Naturschutz. So werden Schutzgebiete und dort geltende Regeln in der digitalen Tourenpla...

The segmentation of individual trees based on deep learning is more accurate than conventional methods. However, a sufficient amount of training data is mandatory to leverage the accuracy potential of deep learning-based approaches. Semi-supervised learning techniques, by contrast, can help simplify the time-consuming labelling process. In this stu...

High population density should drive individuals to more frequently share space and interact, producing better-connected spatial and social networks. Despite this widely-held assumption, it remains unconfirmed how local density generally drives individuals' positions within wild animal networks. We analysed 34 datasets of simultaneous spatial and s...

Animals adjust behavior to changes in perceived predation risk, even when risk is non-consumptive, as is the case for human recreation. However, individuals within populations can differ greatly in their plasticity towards perceived risk, especially when antipredator responses incur fitness costs via lost foraging opportunities. Therefore, risk-ben...

Vertebrate scavengers provide essential ecosystem services such as accelerating carrion decomposition by consuming carcasses, exposing tissues to microbial and invertebrate decomposers, and recycling nutrients back into the ecosystem. Some scavengers do not consume carcasses on site but rather scatter their remains in the surroundings, which might...

Context Many carnivores are attracted to rugged terrain, rocky areas, and conspicuous relief features. However, most of the previous research is limited to general topographical habitat characteristics and rarely consider the effects of microhabitat characteristics. Objectives We used the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) as a model species to investigate...

The bilateral asymmetry of flanks of animals with visual body marks that uniquely identify an individual, complicates tasks like population estimations. Automatically generated additional information on the visible side of the animal would improve the accuracy for individual identification. In this study we used transfer learning on popular CNN ima...

Forest sustainability is vital for climate change mitigation and ecosystem functioning. This is why understanding forest growth dynamics is critical for effective forest management and preservation. Although forest tree decomposition has some good effects in terms of biodiversity, it also poses a threat to forest health (Trumbore et al., 2015), if...

Human activities can affect the behaviour and fitness of wildlife. However, the response of animals to nonlethal human activities has not been well‐studied in wild boar, Sus scrofa, even though it is a widespread species in Europe and has become of increasing concern because of crop damages and its vector capacity for diseases. We study the behavio...

Forests play key roles in climate regulation and essential environmental services for living organisms. This is why forests are the central focus of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 15). Thus, effective forest management is critical for forest sustainability and preservation. Remote sensing advancements have improved forest...

Camera‐trap surveys are increasingly used to assess species interactions, with a growing focus on proximate co‐occurrence, the conditional probability of one species occurring after another within a given time window. However, existing time‐to‐first‐event models, commonly employed for this purpose, suffer from multiple limitations. For instance, th...

The gut microbiome plays a crucial role in the health and well-being of animals. It is especially critical for ruminants that depend on this bacterial community for digesting their food. In this study, we investigated the effects of management conditions and supplemental feeding on the gut bacterial microbiota of red deer (Cervus elaphus) in the Ba...

Wildlife in the Anthropocene is increasingly spatially and temporally constrained by lethal and non-lethal human disturbance. For large carnivores with extensive space requirements, like wolves and Eurasian lynx, avoiding human disturbance in European landscapes is challenging when sufficient space with low disturbance is rarely available. Conseque...

In temperate regions, larger mammalian carrion naturally occurs in terrestrial landscapes as a pulsed resource towards the end of the winter through enhanced ungulate mortality due to starvation or exhaustion. The return of large carnivores in Central Europe provides carrion more equally throughout the year and the active enhancement of carrion for...

Taxus baccata L. is a highly valuable species with wide distribution but scattered and locally rare occurrence. Human intervention, including forest management practices and fragmentation, can significantly impact the species’ genetic diversity, structure, and dynamics. In this study, we investigated these factors within T. baccata populations in t...

Roads can have diverse impacts on wildlife species, and while some species may adapt effectively, others may not. Studying multiple species' responses to the same infrastructure in a given area can help understand this variation and reveal the effects of disturbance on the ecology of wildlife communities. This study investigates the behavioural res...

Wildlife must adapt to human presence to survive in the Anthropocene, so it is critical to understand species responses to humans in different contexts. We used camera trapping as a lens to view mammal responses to changes in human activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 163 species sampled in 102 projects around the world, changes in the amo...

Scavengers benefit from carrion and simultaneously provide essential ecosystem services. To assess benefits and risks that carrion might bring, it is crucial to understand ecosystem-specific scavenger communities. Carrion research has mostly focussed on ungulate carcasses and has rarely explored the effects of carnivore carcasses, which can be crit...

The recovery and expansion of formerly isolated wolf populations in Europe raise questions about the nature of their interactions and future consequences for population viability and conservation. Will fragmented populations fuse or maintain a certain level of isolation with migration? Central Europe is suitable for obtaining empirical data in this...

Key message In European mountain forests, the growth of silver fir ( Abies alba Mill.), sycamore maple ( Acer pseudoplatanus L.), European beech ( Fagus sylvatica L.) and Norway spruce ( Picea abies (L.) H. Karst.) seedlings is more strongly affected by ungulate browsing than by elevation. But, the constraint exerted by ungulates, in particular the...

Rehabilitation of injured or immature individuals has become an increasingly used conservation and management tool. However, scientific evaluation of rehabilitations is rare, raising concern about post-release welfare as well as the cost-effectiveness of spending scarce financial resources. Over the past 20 years, events of juvenile Eurasian lynx p...

1. The decay process of animal carcasses is a highly complex succession driven by abiotic and biotic variables and their interactions. As an underexplored ecological recycling process, understanding carrion decomposition associated with pandemics such as African swine fever is important for predicting the rate and post-mortem interval (PMI) variati...

The increasing popularity of digital media among protected area visitors poses challenges to protected area management. It alters the way visitors move and behave in the area, potentially increasing disturbance of nature, and it might also affect their expectation prior to the visit and their reflection on it. Simultaneously, digital media allow pr...

Behavioral analysis of animals in the wild plays an important role for ecological research and conservation and has been mostly performed by researchers. We introduce an action detection approach that automates this process by detecting animals and performing action recognition on the detected animals in camera trap videos. Our action detection app...

Densely populated regions such as Europe face dramatically increasing numbers of wildlife-vehicle collisions due to growing animal populations, traffic volume, and vehicle speeds. Identifying temporal and geographical collision hotspots can help mitigate wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) and improve animal welfare and human safety. In this study,...

Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap‐derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber‐infrastructures, harmonizati...

Increasing translocation success requires effective post-release monitoring of reintroduced animals. Movement affects animal fitness and survival and is the first response of reintroduced animals, making it an excellent indicator of reintroduction success. However, there is limited information on the early post-release movement of reintroduced anim...

Schalenwildmonitoring in den deutschen Nationalparken-Teil 2: Im Forschungs-und Entwicklungsvorhaben "Schalenwildmonitoring in den deutschen Nationalparken" waren auf Basis eines Fotofallenmonitorings die Bestandesgrößen aller Schalenwildarten in den Nationalparken berechnet worden. Um die Effekte der Schalenwildbestände auf die Waldentwicklung abs...

Wolves (Canis lupus) are recolonising large swathes of their former European territories after a lengthy absence. This expanding distribution brings wolves to areas of naïve human communities, inflating risks to human-wildlife coexistence. As such, understanding public attitudes and perspectives to wolf return is central to supporting human-wildlif...