Matthias Markolf

IUCN SSC Center for Species Survival Cologne Zoo

Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings, but the management and analyses of these raw data present technical challenges. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can fulfil all purposes required for the management, processing, navigation, and analysis of acoustic data. The field...

Guidelines for African Swine Fever prevention and control in facilities breeding endangered wild pig species for conservation

Madagascar, as one of the global biodiversity hotspots, hosts numerous unique terrestrial mammal species that need urgent protection. To identify priority species for conservation, an updated list of terrestrial Malagasy mammal species was compiled, including their threat status, distribution, endemism level, Convention on International Trade in En...

The need for remote, reliable, and scalable monitoring of plummeting biodiversity amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems and changing climate has sparked enormous interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) over multiple disciplines and ecosystems. Even though PAM could support UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Biodiversity I...

In highly threatened habitats such as the dry deciduous forests of western Madagascar, it is essential to develop new approaches to detect population changes and evaluate conservation measures. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is such a promising approach. This method has many advantages over conventional methods, such as time efficiency, money sa...

Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings, but the management and analyses of these raw data present technical challenges. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can fulfil all purposes required for the management, processing, navigation, analysis, and dissemination of acoustic...

Conservation status of Microcebus berthae

We highlight current problems, challenges and dilemmas of conservation action in Madagascar, which is one of the poorest countries, but also the hottest global biodiversity hotspot. Consequences of climate change and the COVID‐19 pandemic exacerbate an already dramatic situation for many protected areas that are under pressure from illegal logging...

Developing new cost-effective methods for monitoring the distribution and abundance of species is essential for conservation biology. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has long been used in marine mammals and has recently been postulated to be a promising method to improve monitoring of terrestrial wildlife as well. Because Madagascar’s lemurs are...

Mangroves are of great ecological importance that provide multiple ecosystem services, shelter, and habitat for many threatened waterbird species. The mangroves of the Menabe Antimena Protected Area (MANAP) in western Madagascar are among the most extensive remaining on the island. The remaining dryland forests of the MANAP have been subjected to i...

Mangroves are globally threatened, disappearing and degraded. They are lost due to land use changes, mostly agricultural expansion and aquaculture, but also degraded by cutting by villagers and logging and timber extraction for domestic and economic purposes. Extent and conversion of mangroves can usually be estimated by applying remote sensing and...

Im Rahmen einer biologischen Doktorarbeit am Deutschen Primatenzentrum (DPZ) in Göttingen war ich insgesamt fünf Mal in Madagaskar. So habe ich etwa 14 Monate auf der Insel verbracht, hauptsächlich auf der Feldstation des DPZ im Kirindy-Trockenwald nahe der Stadt Morondava an der Westküste. Währenddessen habe ich große und kleine Begegnungen mit Me...

Schon die ersten Naturforscher, die Madagaskar besuchten, erkannten die Besonderheit dieser „Schatzinsel der Natur“. Auf Schritt und Tritt begegneten sie unbekannten Tieren, die so exotisch waren, dass sie sie mit Worten aus ihrer Welt nicht zu benennen wussten. Die Madagassen hatten sie wohl aus demselben Grund oft einfach nach den Lauten benannt,...

Mangroves are globally threatened, disappearing and degraded. They are lost due to land use changes, mostly agricultural expansion and aquaculture, but also degraded by cutting by villagers and logging and timber extraction for domestic and economic purposes. Extent and conversion of mangroves can usually be estimated by applying remote sensing and...

IUCN Red List Assessment

Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) has a long history in monitoring aquatic biodiversity but has recently been shown to be a valuable approach for terrestrial taxa as well, including bats, birds, elephants, and primates. As over 90 % of the >100 lemur species known today are threatened by extinction, evaluating the potential of PAM for lemurs is of...

Due to its remarkable species diversity and micro-endemism, Madagascar has recently been suggested to serve as a biogeographic model region. However, hypothesis-based tests of various diversification mechanisms that have been proposed for the evolution of the island's micro-endemic lineages are still limited. Here, we test the fit of several divers...

Species are the fundamental units in evolutionary biology. However, defining them as evolutionary independent lineages requires integration of several independent sources of information in order to develop robust hypotheses for taxonomic classification. Here, we exemplarily propose an integrative framework for species delimitation in the "brown lem...

Species are the fundamental units of comparison in all subfields of biology. Moreover, species are the currency of biological classification and used to define areas of conservation priority. Hence, central questions of evolutionary biology are “what is a species?”, “how can we delimit species?”, “how many species exist?” and “how did species evolv...

Shelters such as leaf nests, tree holes or vegetation tangles play a crucial role in the life of many nocturnal mammals. While information about characteristics and availability of these resources may help in conservation planning, nest use gives an indication about a species' social organisation. The northern giant mouse lemur (Mirza zaza) is thre...

Explaining the biodiversity and, in particular, the high levels of microendemism of primates in Madagascar has been a scientific challenge for many decades. A prerequisite to our understanding of lemur biogeography is high-resolution spatial data based on homogenous sampling effort across the island. Although the distribution of lemurs is comparati...

Although most taxonomists agree that species are independently evolving metapopulation lineages that should be delimited with several kinds of data, the taxonomic practice in Malagasy primates (Lemuriformes) looks quite different. Several recently described lemur species are based solely on evidence of genetic distance and diagnostic characters of...

We provide the first comprehensive data on the lemur community of the Makay massif in south-central Madagascar. During two trips to the area, organized by Naturevolution, we surveyed 12 different sites of the Makay, covering both the dry and humid forests of its multitude of canyons and plateaus. Applying a range of methodologies, we found a divers...

Population bottlenecks as a result of habitat fragmentation or other anthropogenic disturbances are increasingly common, but their consequences remain poorly studied. We studied the genetic population structure of a solitary nocturnal primate, Mirza coquereli, to investigate the demographic history of a local subpopulation in Kirindy Forest, wester...