Mathieu Basille

University of Florida | UF · Ft. Lauderdale Research & Education Center

Behavioural plasticity can allow populations to adjust to environmental change when genetic evolution is too slow to keep pace. However, its constraints are not well understood. Personality is known to shape individual behaviour, but its relationship to behavioural plasticity is unclear. We studied the relationship between boldness and behavioural...

Movement is fundamental to life, shaping population dynamics, biodiversity patterns, and ecosystem structure. In 2008, the movement ecology framework (MEF Nathan et al. in PNAS 105(49):19052–19059, 2008) introduced an integrative theory of organismal movement—linking internal state, motion capacity, and navigation capacity to external factors—which...

Birds exhibit wide variation in their use of aquatic environments, on a spectrum from entirely terrestrial, through amphibious, to highly aquatic. Although there are limited empirical data on hearing sensitivity of birds underwater, mounting evidence indicates that diving birds detect and respond to sound underwater, suggesting that some modificati...

Reptiles exhibit a wide diversity of social systems, and while not very common, exclusive and consensual mating relationships have been documented in several lizard species including lizards from the Teiidae family. Here, we document dyadic movement behavior between an adult male and female Salvator merianae (Argentine Black and White Tegu), a larg...

Seabirds are amongst the most mobile of all animal species and spend large amounts of their lives at sea. They cross vast areas of ocean that appear superficially featureless, and our understanding of the mechanisms that they use for navigation remains incomplete, especially in terms of available cues. In particular, several large-scale navigationa...

The federally threatened American crocodile ( Crocodylus acutus ) is a flagship species and ecological indicator of hydrologic restoration in the Florida Everglades. We conducted a long-term capture-recapture study on the South Florida population of American crocodiles from 1978 to 2015 to evaluate the effects of restoration efforts to more histori...

In many species of birds, parental care is provided by both parents to maximize offspring survival, and there may be important trade-offs between maximizing food gathering and nest protection during the nesting period. The role of parental care in determining reproductive success was investigated in Wood Storks (Mycteria americana), and specificall...

Diseases carried by northern raccoons present significant health hazards to both people and pets. This 7-page fact sheet written by Caitlin Jarvis and Mathieu Basille and published by the UF/IFAS Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation is part of a series addressing health hazards associated with raccoons. It describes the raccoon roundworm...

Diseases carried by northern raccoons present significant health hazards to both people and pets. This 7-page fact sheet written by Caitlin Jarvis, Samantha M. Wisely, and Mathieu Basille and published by the UF/IFAS Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation is part of a series addressing health hazards associated with raccoons. It describes...

Diseases carried by northern raccoons present significant health hazards to both people and pets. This 7-page fact sheet written by Caitlin Jarvis and Mathieu Basille and published by the UF/IFAS Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation is part of a series addressing health hazards associated with raccoons. It describes the most important in...

In a highly dynamic airspace, flying animals are predicted to adjust foraging behaviour to variable wind conditions to minimize movement costs. Sexual size dimorphism is widespread in wild animal populations, and for large soaring birds which rely on favourable winds for energy‐efficient flight, differences in morphology, wing loading and associate...

Background: Recursive movement patterns have been used to detect behavioral structure within individual movement trajectories in the context of foraging ecology, home-ranging behavior, and predator avoidance. Some animals exhibit movement recursions to locations that are tied to reproductive functions, including nests and dens; while existing lite...

Movement is fundamental to life, shaping population dynamics, biodiversity patterns, and ecosystem structure. Recent advances in tracking technology have enabled fundamental questions about movement to be tackled, leading to the development of the movement ecology framework (MEF), considered a milestone in the field [1]. The MEF introduced an integ...

Citizen science (CS) contributes to the knowledge about species distributions, which is a critical foundation in the studies of invasive species, biological conservation, and response to climatic change. In this study, we assessed the value of CS for termites worldwide. First, we compared the abundance and species diversity of geo-tagged termite re...

As most species live in seasonal environments, considering varying conditions is essential to understand species dynamics in both geographic and ecological spaces. Both resident and migratory species need to contend with seasonality and balance settling in favorable areas with tracking favorable environmental conditions during the year. We present...

The function of migration is to allow exploitation of resources whose availability is heterogeneous in space and time. Much effort has been historically directed to studying migration as a response to seasonal, predictable fluctuations in resource availability in temperate species. A deeper understanding of how different migration patterns emerge i...

Citizen science (CS) contributes to the combined knowledge about species distributions, which is a critical foundation in the studies of invasive species, biological conservation, and response to climatic change. In this study, we assessed the value of CS for termites worldwide. First, we compared the abundance and species diversity of geo-tagged t...

The advent of miniaturized biologging devices has provided ecologists with unprecedented opportunities to record animal movement across scales, and led to the collection of ever‐increasing quantities of tracking data. In parallel, sophisticated tools have been developed to process, visualize and analyse tracking data; however, many of these tools h...

iNaturalist is one of the most popular citizen science data portals in the world. Citizens can submit pictures of biological observations to an online data base to be reviewed by the rich online community and used for important biodiversity research around the world. Users can use the iNaturalist ap to plan community projects and bioblitzes and lea...

A BioBlitz is an intensive citizen-science biodiversity survey. During a short period of time, experts and volunteers conduct an intensive survey to record all species living in a designated area. BioBlitzes have been conducted all around the world, and are now commonly used to engage citizen in biodiversity inventory, tracking rare and invasive sp...

The function of migration is to allow exploitation of resources whose availability is heterogeneous in space and time. Much effort has been historically directed to studying migration as a response to seasonal, predictable fluctuations in resource availability in temperate species. A deeper understanding of how different migration patterns emerge i...

In many birds, parental care is carried out by both parents to maximize offspring survival, and there may be important trade-offs between maximizing food gathering and nest protection during the nesting period. We investigated the role of parental care in determining reproductive success of Wood Storks (Mycteria americana), and evaluated how the tr...

The use of tracking devices for collecting animal movement data has become widespread in recent decades. In parallel, this has sparked a proliferation of methods to infer individual behavior from tracking data. Being able to learn more than only the movement trajectories of animals from telemetry data is one of the major forces pushing the field of...

The advent of miniaturized biologging devices has provided ecologists with unparalleled opportunities to record animal movement across scales, and led to the collection of ever-increasing quantities of tracking data. In parallel, sophisticated tools to process, visualize and analyze tracking data have been developed in abundance. Within the R softw...

As most species live in seasonal environments, considering varying conditions is essential to understand species dynamics in both geographic and ecological spaces. Both resident and migratory species need to contend with seasonality, and balance settling in favorable areas with tracking favorable environmental conditions during the year. We present...

This tutorial is the third part in a series of three: • General concepts illustrated with the world Map • Adding additional layers: an example with points and polygons • Positioning and layout for complex maps (this document) After the presentation of basic map concepts, and the flexible approach in layers implemented in ggplot2, this part illustra...

This tutorial is the second part in a series of three: • General concepts illustrated with the world map • Adding additional layers: an example with points and polygons (this document) • Positioning and layout for complex maps In the previous part, we presented general concepts with a map with little information (country borders only). The modular...

Large herbivores respond to fluctuations in predation and hunting risk. The temporal scale of risk heterogeneity affects behavioral responses and determines the usefulness of metrics to quantify them. We present a conceptual framework to link anti-predator responses to risk fluctuations and appropriate metrics, based on temporal scale. We applied t...

With the proliferation of sensors and the ease of data collection from online sources, large datasets have become the norm in many scientific disciplines, and efficient data storage, management, and retrival is imperative for large research projects. Relational databases provide a solution, but in order to be useful, must be able to be linked to an...

This tutorial is the first part in a series of three: • General concepts illustrated with the world Map (this document) • Adding additional layers: an example with points and polygons • Positioning and layout for complex maps In this part, we will cover the fundamentals of mapping using ggplot2 associated to sf, and presents the basics elements and...

Mycteria americana (Wood Stork) is an iconic wading bird whose range includes Latin America and the southeastern US, where it is federally listed as threatened. Wetlands in the Gulf Coast states are used as post-breeding grounds by some individuals from both the US and the Mexican/Central American populations, and Wood Storks observed east and west...

Background: GPS telemetry has revolutionized the study of animal spatial ecology in the last two decades. Until recently, it has mainly been deployed on large mammals and birds, but the technology is rapidly becoming miniaturized, and applications in diverse taxa are becoming possible. Large constricting snakes are top predators in their ecosystems...

The study of habitat selection of a given species, in a different environmental context, represents a major step to enhance the knowledge of that species ecology. Although grey wolf (Canis lupus) and Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) ecology has been largely studied across Europe, to date, no systematic study has been done in Romania. This study, entirely...

Successful species conservation is dependent on adequate estimates of population dynamics, but age-specific demographics are generally lacking for many long-lived iteroparous species such as large reptiles. Accurate demographic information allows estimation of population growth rate, as well as projection of future population sizes and quantitative...

In the subterranean termite Coptotermes gestroi (Wasmann), soldiers developing in incipient colonies display strong fluctuating asymmetry when compared with soldiers developing in mature colonies. This strong asymmetry may arise from two different types of stress factors on individuals. First, the accelerated development of nanitic (small) soldiers...

Where do the animals go when the sea rises? Learn the probable futures of Florida panthers and other south Florida wildlife in this 5-page fact sheet. Written by Larry Perez, James I. Watling, David Bucklin, Mathieu Basille, Frank J. Mazzotti, Stephanie Romañach, and Laura Brandt and published by the UF Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservati...

Climate plays an important role in the distribution of species. A given species may adjust to new conditions in-place, move to new areas with suitable climates, or go extinct. Scientists and conservation practitioners use mathematical models to predict the effects of future climate change on wildlife and plan for a biodiverse future. This 8-page fa...

Ecological theory predicts that the intensity of antipredator responses is dependent upon the spatiotemporal context of predation risk (the risk allocation hypothesis). However, most studies to date have been conducted over small spatial extents, and did not fully take into account gradual responses to predator proximity. We simultaneously collecte...

1.Animal space use has been studied by focusing either on geographic (e.g., home ranges, species' distribution) or environmental (e.g., habitat use and selection) space. However, all patterns of space use emerge from individual movements, which are the primary means by which animals change their environment. 2.Individuals increase their use of a gi...

In a termite colony, the incipient phase is the most critical part of the life of the colony. The quality of the investment in the first offspring by the primary reproductives may determine the rate of success of the colony to survive the first year and its growth rate in the following years. However, termite colonies possess a physiological constr...

Social insect colonies can provide homeostatic conditions that buffer the incidence of environmental fluctuations on individuals, which have contributed to their ecological success. Coptotermes (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) is a highly invasive termite genus and several species have important economic impact in many areas of the world. Mature Coptote...

Background/Question/Methods The behavioral game taking place between predators and prey largely determines their spatial distributions. One possible, and surprising, outcome of this behavioral response race is the leapfrog effect, whereby predators match the distribution of their prey’s resources, while prey undermatch their own resources to redu...

AimTo assess the usefulness of combining climate predictors with additional types of environmental predictors in species distribution models for range-restricted species, using common correlative species distribution modelling approaches.LocationFlorida, USAMethods We used five different algorithms to create distribution models for 14 vertebrate sp...

1. Impediments to animal movement are ubiquitous and vary widely in both scale and permeability. It is essential to understand how impediments alter ecological dynamics via their influence on animal behavioural strategies governing space use and, for anthropogenic features such as roads and fences, how to mitigate these effects to effectively manag...

The dynamic nature of their internal states and the environment directly shape animals' spatial behaviours and give rise to emergent properties at broader scales in natural systems. However, integrating these dynamic features into habitat selection studies remains challenging, due to practically impossible field work to access internal states and t...

This chapter introduces the Pl/R extension, a very powerful alternative to integrate the features offered by R in the database in a gapless workflow. Pl/R is a loadable procedural language that allows the use of the R engine and libraries directly inside the database, thus embedding R scripts into SQL statements and database functions and triggers....

The objects of movement ecology studies are animals whose movements are usually sampled at more-or-less regular intervals. This spatiotemporal sequence of locations is the basic, measured information that is stored in the database. Starting from this data set, animal movements can be analysed (and visualised) using a large set of different methods...

This book guides animal ecologists, biologists and wildlife and data managers through a step-by-step procedure to build their own advanced software platforms to manage and process wildlife tracking data. This unique, problem-solving-oriented guide focuses on how to extract the most from GPS animal tracking data, while preventing error propagation a...

In recent years, new wildlife tracking and telemetry technologies have become available, leading to substantial growth in the volume of wildlife tracking data. In the future, one can expect an almost exponential increase in collected data as new sensors are integrated into current tracking systems. A crucial limitation for efficient use of telemetr...

A wildlife tracking data management system must include the capability to explicitly deal with the spatial properties of movement data. GPS tracking data are sets of spatiotemporal objects (locations), and the spatial component must be properly managed. You will now extend the database built in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4, adding spatial functionalities thro...

Animals move in and interact with complex environments that can be characterised by a set of spatial layers containing environmental data. Spatial databases can manage these different data sets in a unified framework, defining spatial and non-spatial relationships that simplify the analysis of the interaction between animals and their habitat. A la...

This chapter looks into the spatiotemporal dimension of both animal tracking data sets and the dynamic environmental data that can be associated with them. Typically, these geographic layers derive from remote sensing measurements, commonly those collected by sensors deployed on earth-orbiting satellites, which can be updated on a monthly, weekly o...

Tracking data can potentially be affected by a large set of errors in different steps of data acquisition and processing. Erroneous data can heavily affect analysis, leading to biased inference and misleading wildlife management/conservation suggestions. Data quality assessment is therefore a key step in data management. In this chapter, we especia...

Habitat selection studies generally assume that animals select habitat and food resources at multiple scales to maximise their fitness. However, animals sometimes prefer habitats of apparently low quality, especially when considering the costs associated with spatially heterogeneous human disturbance. We used spatial variation in human disturbance,...

Recent studies of animal habitat selection are inferring more detail regarding the behavioural mechanisms involved, like functional responses and familiarity effects. Changes in animals’ use or selection of a habitat type with changing availability are commonly interpreted as a functional response in habitat preference. Studies of familiarity infer...

Species interactions within food webs are driven by multiple constraints, including those imposed by seasonal changes in the environment. Ecologically sound definitions of seasons may therefore be a prerequisite for clarifying predatorprey interactions. Most studies define biological seasons based on fixed schedules or on temporal changes in a sing...

Based on 1,053 signs of presence collected between 2002 and 2006 by a network of well-trained observers, we modelled the occurrence of the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) in France using two methods. The Mahalanobis distance factor analysis (MADIFA) provided a measure of habitat suitability based on environmental covariates, and site-occupancy modelling...

In human-dominated landscapes, species with large spatial requirements, such as large carnivores, have to deal with human infrastructure and activities within their home ranges. This is the case for the brown bear (Ursus arctos L., 1758) in Scandinavia, which is colonizing more human-dominated landscapes, leading inevitably to an overlap between th...

The field of habitat ecology has been muddled by imprecise terminology regarding what constitutes habitat, and how importance is measured through use, selection, avoidance and other bio-statistical terminology. Added to the confusion is the idea that habitat is scale-specific. Despite these conceptual difficulties, ecologists have made advances in...

The extent to which large carnivores compete with hunters for harvestable populations of wild ungulates is a topic of widespread controversy in many areas of the world where carnivore populations are recovering or are reintroduced. Theory predicts that predation impacts should vary with prey density and environmental conditions. To test this predic...

In the multi-use landscape of southern Norway, the distribution of lynx is likely to be determined both by the abundance of their favoured prey – the roe deer – and the risk associated with the presence of humans because most lynx mortalities are caused by humans (recreational harvest, poaching, vehicle collisions). We described the distribution of...

Bark stripping by large herbivores is widespread, yet poorly understood. Our study was carried out in a 2000-ha area situated in the Vosges Mountains, France, where beech Fagus sylvatica bark is heavily bark stripped by red deer Cervus elaphus. We tested whether the seasonal variation in the frequency of beech bark stripping by red deer was correla...

Understanding the relationships between organisms and their habitat is a central question in ecology. The study of habitat selection often refers to the static description of the pattern resulting from the selection process. However the very nature of this habitat selection process is dynamic, as it relies on individual movements, which are affecte...