Michael Campbell

Simon Fraser University

Eagles are generally regarded as the kings of birds in virtually every culture across the world. Therefore, they are possibly the most important non-domesticated birds in the world, in terms of their relationships with people and are among the most recognized species, at least as much as chickens or doves. Eagles are characterized by huge or large...

This article examines progress in drone-based research methods applied to animal ecology, in terms of applications to the field study of large birds of prey (raptors). Drone-based research methods have evolved out of the larger technological field of geomatics and are entwined with developments in GPS and biotelemetry, which enable accurate locatio...

Traditional zoogeographical theory focuses on global regions, with less attention to small spaces shared by people and animals. Two relevant, possibly opposite, research strands, the statistical analysis of alert/flight distances and the subjective 'actancy' strand within animal geography are rarely examined as complementary to a new look at micros...

The relationship between people and the cougar Puma concolor and other larger predators in Canada (brown bears Ursus arctos, black bears Ursus americanus) and Latin America (jaguars Panthera onca) is examined in a comparative mode for cases in Kamloops and Vancouver Island, Canada and El Salvador. Literature derived hypotheses mooting greater sympa...

This book covers selected topics on research methods in modern ecology, focussing on animal ecology, landcover assessment and habitat change. This is plainly a vast area, due to the multiplicity of research foci and the great range of research techniques available. Two main clusters of research methods have emerged: laboratory studies and field tec...

INTRODUCTION This book is edited by two environmental scientists with interests in GIS and remote sensing applications, forest, and habitat change, and large animal ecology. It examines the cutting-edge issues related to animal and habitat ecology research and management, with case studies across Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The topics...

Protected Area (PA) establishment is one of the commoner strategies for wildlife conservation, but the effectiveness of these developments is rarely evaluated in terms of species’ performance. This article assesses the effectiveness of PAs of Central India, using an assessment of threatened vulture species. These species may be considered as keysto...

This book examines the agricultural history of Ghana from the perspective of political ecology, a paradigm particularly suited for the analysis and understanding of complex African environments. The issues of power, need, marginalization, management, structures, and actors are strong parameters that emerge in such a study. Covering as it does a lon...

PREFACE El Salvador is regarded as the most environmentally challenged nation in Latin America, despite its location in the highly ecological Meso- American Biodiversity Hotspot. This geophysical, ecological and geopolitical relationship has created serious ecological, economic and sociopolitical cataclysms, and positive conservation actions that...

British Columbia (BC), Canada is arguably the most important region of North America for large carnivore/human interaction studies, with the continent’s highest densities of cougars and bears, and a rapidly increasing, urbanizing, recreationally oriented and environmentally aware human population. Vancouver Island, BC, with 0.3% of the total area o...

Indian vultures have important ecological and socio-economic functions and are increasingly studied, per their ecological role and recently, their catastrophic populations’ decline. However, there are few studies of vultures in central India, a vulture stronghold. The present paper examined the presence, distribution per landcover variation, roosti...

ABSTRACT This article examines progress in drone-based research methods applied to animal ecology, in terms of applications to the field study of large birds of prey (raptors). Drone-based research methods have evolved out of the larger technological field of geomatics and are entwined with developments in GPS and biotelemetry, which enable accur...

Human quality of life (QOL), a vital aspect of human habitation of landscapes, is influenced not only by societal relations and the physical environment but also by human–animal relations. Large carnivores affect QOL negatively, through people’s fear of threats and attacks, and actual observations of aggressive behavior. Such carnivores may also ma...

Green spaces (greenbelts surrounding urban areas and greenhearts within urban areas) are increasingly recognised as vital for urban ecological health, this concept encompassing air quality, wildlife presence and habitat development, and with consequent contributions to human quality of life. Adaptive management (AM), a broadly sourced evaluative me...

Human–avian interactions in urban areas are an important aspect of human quality of life (QOL). Positive impacts on QOL include the aesthetic value of wildlife observation and nature bonding. Negative impacts on QOL include noise, waste material deposition, disease and attacks on domestic animals and people. In the QOL-conscious cities of North Ame...

ABSTRACT The under-researched intersection of social media, conservation psychology, environmental psychology, geomatics, conservation biology and large carnivore conservation is reaching a crisis point, yet few studies have examined this crucial dynamic. Conservation psychology, an important, emerging and evolving strand of environmental psycholog...

This book, Biological Conservation in The Twenty First Century: A Conservation Biology of Large Wildlife covers certain topics from the vast, multi-disciplinary field of conservation biology, a discipline too large for one volume. The common theme for all the articles is the conservation biology of large wildlife, a term variously defined but commo...

This chapter examines the development of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for animal tracking and their applications to the key issues of conservation biology. It also presents case studies of wildlife conservation and enumerates parameters that would be the focus of advanced GPS and associated techniques. GPS are the basis for advanced techniques...

Geomatics Applications to Conservation Biology

ABSTRACT This chapter takes a critical look at deforestation and savanna development in Ghana. This study of this topic depends on the approach of applied biogeography. It is argued that the whole picture is incomplete, as several gaps exist in current knowledge of the prehistoric, precolonial and even colonial (19th and 20th century) landcover. A...

The conservation of the lion (Panthera leo), a dominant apex predator, indispensable ecological mainstay and popular wildlife symbol, is one of the most important issues in current conservation biology research and indeed is a relevant topic for other disciplines such as applied ecology, biogeography and political ecology. The conservation issues f...

For receiving the full version of the book (or my Chapter) call me over RG mailing or by regular e-mail: a_koval54@ukr.net Thanks for your's interest, Andrey Kovalchuk

This edited book, composed of chapters written by scholars of the environmental and biological sciences, examines selected topics from the vast field of conservation biology, with a focus on some of the issues that dominate the current discourses and practices on the conservation biology of large wildlife. The first chapter examines the history and...

Vultures are among the world’s largest flying birds and hence are an important constituent of large wildlife. This chapter considers the conservation biology of vultures, based on their physiology, ecology and recent actions by people, especially eradication of their food sources, killing for food and other reasons and perhaps most importantly, the...

The interface between environmental psychology and wildlife studies is crucial for modern conservation, as human learning, perception and decisions determine conservation of habitats and wildlife in places of nature/society conflict, and possible ameliorative action. This chapter examines certain components of environmental psychology and argues th...

Avian island presence depends on extremely complex environmental variables, including degradation, landcover, climate/weather and other species change and island accessibility from larger land masses, as well as subject bird physiology and habits. Turkey and Black vultures increasingly range over North America, but are under-studied in the Caribbea...

Like the vampire, the mothman or the flying witch, the huge, dark vulture has been portrayed as embedded in the human consciousness, eliciting fear, excitement, reverence and consequent, predictable and less predictable human behavioral responses; flight, worship, legend creation, bird anthropomorphization and conservation and even bird eradication...

THE ADAPTATION OF THE TURKEY VULTURE (CATHARTES AURA, LINNAEUS 1758) TO CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES AND ECOLOGIES Michael Campbell Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada ABSTRACT The Turkey vulture of the Genus Cathartes is the most wide-ranging avian obligate scavenger in the New World (North and South America), being recorded in the coniferous...

Zoology 53-2207 QL696 2014-35370 CIP Campbell, Michael O'Neal. Vultures: their evolution, ecology and conservation. CRC Press, 2015. 364p bibl index afp ISBN 9781482223613, $103.96; ISBN 9781482223620 ebook, $90.97. This authoritative volume provides detailed information on all vultures of the world, including condors. Campbell's thorough review of...

The jaguar (Panthera onca, Linnaeus 1758) and cougar (Puma concolor, Linnaeus 1771) are the largest cats in the Americas and are listed as uniquely extinct in El Salvador, Central America. The contributory factors for this event are little understood and/or ignored. This omission hampers conservation planning for declining big cat populations in ot...

The Turkey vulture of the Genus Cathartes is the most wide-ranging avian obligate scavenger in the New World (North and South America), being recorded in the coniferous forests of Canada and the Northern United States, the vast plains of the American mid-west, the Western cordillera and deserts, several islands in the Caribbean, the deciduous fores...

Turkey and Black vulture ranges are expanding in the Americas despite environmental change, while Old World vulture populations are declining in Eurasia and Africa. The distribution of vultures is under-researched in El Salvador, arguably the most environmentally degraded Latin American nation. This article tests the hypothesis that Turkey and Blac...

URBAN PLANNING FOR COUGAR PRESENCE IN NORTH AMERICA: PRACTICES, CHALLENGES AND BENEFITS Michael O’Neal Campbell ABSTRACT This chapter examines cougar-human contacts in North America, as an issue of urban ecology, planning and management. Cougar-human interactions are increasing in several North American cities, but the reasons for these occurrences...

Convergent evolution, an extremely important topic within biodiversity studies, refers to the independent development of similar features in the descendants of different ancestral groups. The variably derived descendants may be similar, depending on the analogues or similar features. New and Old World vultures are an interesting example of converge...

This chapter examines cougar-human contacts in North America, as an issue of urban ecology, planning and management. Cougar-human interactions are increasing in several North American cities, but the reasons for these occurences are not clear. From the perspective of urban planning, important practices are green space development and variable polic...

Traditional zoogeographical theory focuses on global regions, with less attention to small spaces shared by people and animals. Two relevant, possibly opposite, research strands, the statistical analysis of alert/flight distances and the subjective 'actancy' strand within animal geography are rarely examined as complementary to a new look at micros...

This book looks at theories of nature-society relations and development, applied to soil erosion and environmental change in West Africa, and Ghana. Acknowledging the importance of power relations for environmental management, the book begins with an examination of the field of political ecology, alternately the "political economy of the environmen...

In British Columbia, brown bears (Ursus arctos), black bears (Ursus americanus), and cougars (Puma concolor) must relate to growing human populations. This study examines age- and gender-related attitudes to these animals in the urbanizing, agriculturally significant, intermontane city of Kamloops. Most respondents, especially women, feared cougars...

This article examines the various theoretical frameworks and paradigm tools in ecological methods that have been developed to analyze the structure of the African savanna. These are based on the new disequilibrium ecology paradigm, (in contrast to the classical ecology paradigm), which sees the savanna as in continual flux rather than sable equilib...

The critical appraisal of deforestation and the methods for such investigations have recently become important issues internationally. This book examines the socio-environmental relations and environmental changes in the African savanna. Socio-environmental relations in sub-Saharan Africa: the externalities of deforestation, floods, droughts, fires...

This book takes an incisive, political ecology perspective of the development of agriculture in the West African nation of Ghana (formerly the British colony of the Gold Coast), focusing on agricultural, socio-cultural, economic, political and environmental issues during the pre-colonial (pre-16th century), colonial and post colonial periods (after...

Different bird species react differently to human proximity in urban parks. The ‘alert distance’, i.e. the distance between a bird and an approaching person when the bird reacts visibly to the intruder, and the flight distance, the distance between the two when the bird takes flight, vary for different bird species. Such alert distances are less st...

High human population density, histories of social conflict, environmental change and negative social attitudes are crucial issues for large carnivore conservation and reintroductions, which may be influenced by human age and gender, animal size and behaviour. Jaguars and pumas are extinct in El Salvador, but conservation and reintroduction schemes...

The sharp increase in the human population of Vancouver Island; the urban development policy favoring forest fragmentation and smaller, scattered settlements; and the relatively sizable population of large predatory mammals have contributed to one of the highest human-large predator contact zones in North America. Although some studies have evaluat...

Animal geography's focus on the shared "actant" behaviour of animals and people contributes an important reexamination of animal ecology, including possibilities of animal foraging "strategies" and codependent behaviour with people. This paper studies avian inter- and intraspecies competition for human-proffered food (HPF) using a case study of eig...

Urban forestry is increasingly vital for both wildlife conservation and human use, despite frequent conflicts between these functions. A fundamental task in urban habitat and recreation forestry is the identification of those habitat characteristics important for animal species and the evaluation of these within the geographies of human presence, u...

Avian scavengers are common and active in the social life of southern Ghana, yet few studies consider both the ecological factors for avian presence and the avian–human interactions from human gender and age perspectives, and compare avian behaviour in both human-dominated and natural landscapes. This paper examines interactions between people, hoo...

Understanding human reactions to wildlife, including the differing reactions of different groups to different species, is important given that expanding human population and settlements increasingly result in natural habitat loss or modification and, consequently, wildlife adaptation and encroachment into cleared and created human spaces such as wa...

Few studies examine the impact of large reptile presence on local livelihoods in West Africa. This article investigates how land users share habituated and resource areas with pythons, cobras and monitor lizards in southern Ghana. An innovative animal geography approach is used, evaluating both reptiles and people as individually active subjects, t...

Seabirds and freshwater bird species have increasingly colonised urbanised landscapes. However, there have been few multispecies studies of the ecological impacts of shoreline development and nonriverine features on waterbird habitation and conservation. This article examines the relationship between waterbird foraging presence and associations and...

Animal behaviour is vital for livestock choices, but is less researched in West Africa than economic considerations. An animal geography framework is applied to the socio-economic context of livestock behaviour in coastal Ghana, assessing the shared ‘actant’ behaviour of people and animals, and the contribution of such a study to animal geography a...

Animal geography, emphasising jointly ‘actant’ behaviour of animals and people, encourages an innovative rethink of animal ecology, including animal strategies, hopes and fears in foraging, in a co-dependent framework with human behaviour. This paper studies bird–human reactions and feeding interactions in Peterborough, Ontario. It uses ecological...

Animal geography has created a ‘new’ look at animal–human relations, incorporating the shared subjectivities of jointly ‘actant’ behaviour. This approach is particularly relevant to urban geographies of avian presence, given the increased intensity of human habitation, with birds as the commonest and most mobile urban animals. The inter- and intra-...

Urban avian foraging is strongly affected by approaching people. Avian alert distances, the instant of a bird's appraisal of human intrusion, have not been studied in a comparative mode for passerines, despite their prominent ecological importance in parks. Alert distances for 13 passerines were examined in parks in Stirling, Scotland, using an inn...

Coconut groves have been described as important, historic resources of Ghanaian coastal agro-ecological zones. Although some recent surveys have revealed serious declines in coconut groves because of disease, woodcutting, settlement expansion, and coastal erosion, few studies document the situation of coconut groves within the larger socioenvironme...

This article argues that insufficient attention has been paid in the recent literature to the social and environmental factors which regulate hunting in Ghanaian savannas, and to how this may influence the sustainability of their livelihoods. Despite the vital significance of this issue, the emphasis in the literature and media has been on the dest...

The sustainability of introduced technology in rural contexts is based on the socioenvironmental networking of local stakeholders, a point generally ignored in Ghana. A case study is given of an irrigation project from the coastal savanna of Ghana, a region appraised by contested assessments of drought and social conflict. Using a methodology based...

Despite recent interest in sacred (fetish) groves as remnant forests, few studies have investigated their sustainability and conservation role in West Africa. This article employs a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) analysis of time series images (1960-98), comprehensive social surveys and ecological field methods to evaluate four sacred grove...

Although the introduced neem tree Azadirachta indica A. Juss is a very important energy source in the coastal savanna of Ghana, the sustainability of small-scale wood harvesting (SSWH) has not been investigated with regard to this species. This paper assesses the sustainability of SSWH on neem stands in the coastal savanna, using a socio-economic a...

Insufficient attention has been paid to the methods used by rain-fed farmers to achieve sustainability in their livelihoods in the dry coastal savanna of Ghana. Official accounts describe such activities as declining under increased drought. Such assessments have not been based on sufficient evidence. Using a methodology based on actor network theo...

There is increased international interest in religiously based restrictions on land and forest stand use. However, the extent to which so-called sacred groves represent earlier forest ecosystems, and their possible role in biodiversity conservation, are interrelated and complex issues, and neglected in the context of Ghanaian savannahs, which are b...

This article analyses land use and vegetation change in the savanna contexts of central Zimbabwe and coastal Ghana. The results of analyses based on field surveys, time series aerial photographs/satellite images and GIS methods challenge current assumptions of linear vegetation change under social dynamics in these two contexts. The evidence from t...

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2002. Includes bibliographical references.