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Introduction
Additional affiliations
May 2009 - September 2012
October 2012 - July 2016
Education
October 2012 - June 2016
January 2008 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (80)
Animals moving through landscapes need to strike a balance between finding sufficient resources to grow and reproduce while minimizing encounters with predators. Because encounter rates are determined by the average distance over which directed motion persists, this trade-off should be apparent in individuals’ movement. Using GPS data from 1,396 in...
1 Movement is a key component of an animal's life history. While there are numerous factors that influence movement, there is an inherent link between a species' social ecology and its movement ecology. Despite this inherent relationship, the socio-spatial ecology of many species remains unknown, hampering ecological theory and conservation alike....
Recent years have seen considerable scientific attention devoted towards documenting the presence of microplastics (MPs) in environmental samples. Due to omnipresence of environmental microplastics, however, disentangling environmental MPs from sample contamination is a challenge. Hence, the environmental (collection site and laboratory) microplast...
Protected areas are important for ecological conservation while simultaneously supporting culturally, and economically valuable tourism. However, excessive guest volumes strain operations and risk human-wildlife conflict, threatening the sustainability of nature-based tourism. Thus, park managers need to know what factors underpin attendance and ho...
Plastic pollution is now so widespread that microplastics are regularly detected in biological samples surveyed for their presence. Despite their pervasiveness, very little is known about the effects of microplastics on the health of terrestrial vertebrates. While emerging studies are showing that microplastics represent a potentially serious threa...
An animal’s home range plays a fundamental role in determining its resource use and overlap with conspecifics, competitors and predators, and is therefore a common focus of movement ecology studies. Autocorrelated kernel density estimation addresses many of the shortcomings of traditional home range estimators when animal tracking data is autocorre...
Three‐dimensional (3D) vegetation structure influences animal movements and, consequently, ecosystem functions. Animals disperse the seeds of 60%–90% of trees in tropical rainforests, which are among the most structurally complex ecosystems on Earth.
Here, we investigated how 3D rainforest structure influences the movements of large, frugivorous bi...
Direct encounters, in which two or more individuals are physically close to one another, are a topic of increasing interest as more and better movement data become available. Recent progress, including the development of statistical tools for estimating robust measures of changes in animals’ space use over time, facilitates opportunities to link di...
The amount of space organisms use is thought to be tightly linked to the availability of resources within their habitats, such that organisms living in productive habitats generally require less space than those in resource-poor habitats. This hypothesis has widespread em-pirical support, but existing studies have focused primarily on responses to...
Movement is a key component of an animal's life history. While there are numerous factors that influence movement, there is an inherent link between a species' social ecology and its movement ecology. Despite this inherent relationship, the socio‐spatial ecology of many species remains unknown, hampering ecological theory and conservation alike. He...
Anthropogenic habitat alteration and climate change are two well‐known contributors to biodiversity loss through changes to species distribution and abundance; yet, disentangling the effects of these two factors is often hindered by their inherent confound across both space and time. We leveraged a contrast in habitat alteration associated with the...
Protected areas are widely used management tools designed to support the long-term conservation of biodiversity. The effectiveness of protected areas is being challenged by human-induced climate change, however, which is causing three broad shifts away from the current distribution of climate trends: a change in mean conditions, a change in the var...
The long‐term conservation of species at risk relies on numerous, and often concurrent, management actions to support their recovery. Generally, these actions are habitat‐based while others are focused on a species' position within its ecological community. Less studied are the impacts from human presence, despite evidence that human activity may r...
Plant cold hardiness is a dynamic process, and seasonal changes occur through cold acclimation and deacclimation to help prevent lethal injury from the cold. Cold weather injury resulting from inadequate plant cold hardiness can result in significant economic losses to growers of perennial crops in temperate climates. The objective of the current s...
The past several decades have seen alarming declines in the reproductive health of humans, animals and plants. While humans have introduced numerous pollutants that can impair reproductive systems (such as well-documented endocrine disruptors), the potential for microplastics (MPs) to be contributing to the widespread declines in fertility is parti...
The past several decades have seen alarming declines in the reproductive health of humans, animals and plants. While humans have introduced numerous pollutants that can impair reproductive systems (such as well-documented endocrine disruptors), the potential for microplastics (MPs) to be contributing to the widespread declines in fertility is parti...
Direct encounters, in which two or more individuals are physically close to one another, are a topic of increasing interest as more and better movement data become available. Recent progress, including the development of statistical tools for estimating robust measures of changes in animals’ space use over time, facilitates opportunities to link di...
COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020 reduced human mobility, providing an opportunity to disentangle its effects on animals from those of landscape modifications. Using GPS data, we compared movements and road avoidance of 2300 terrestrial mammals (43 species) during the lockdowns to the same period in 2019. Individual responses were variable with no c...
Projects focused on movement behaviour and home range are commonplace, but beyond a focus on choosing appropriate research questions, there are no clear guidelines for such studies. Without these guidelines, designing an animal tracking study to produce reliable estimates of space‐use and movement properties (necessary to answer basic movement ecol...
Recent years have seen considerable scientific attention devoted towards documenting the presence of microplastics (MPs) in environmental samples. Due to omnipresence of environmental microplastics, however, disentangling environmental MPs from sample contamination is a challenge. Hence, the environmental (collection site and laboratory) microplast...
Projects focused on movement behavior and home range are commonplace, but beyond a focus on choosing appropriate research questions, there are no clear guidelines for such studies. We developed 'movedesign', a user-friendly Shiny application, which can be utilized to investigate the precision of three estimates regularly reported in movement and sp...
Modern home‐range estimation typically relies on data derived from expensive radio‐ or GPS‐tracking. Although trapping represents a low‐cost alternative to telemetry, evaluation of the performance of home‐range estimators on trap‐derived data is lacking. Using simulated data, we evaluated three variables reflecting the key trade‐offs ecologists fac...
Plastic pollution is now so widespread that microplastics are consistently detected in every biological sample surveyed for their presence. Despite their pervasiveness, very little is known about the effects of microplastics on the health of terrestrial species. While emerging studies are showing that microplastics represent a potentially serious t...
Decades of careless use and improper disposal have resulted in plastic pollution accumulating almost everywhere on earth, yet the health implications of the billions of tons of plastic pollution scattered across the planet's terrestrial ecosystems are largely unknown. We show that microplastics are present in the follicular fluid of women and domes...
Quantifying animal movements is necessary for answering a wide array of research questions in ecology and conservation biology. Consequently, ecologists have made considerable efforts to identify the best way to estimate an animal’s home range, and many methods of estimating home ranges have arisen over the past half century. Most of these methods...
Translocation and captivity are important tools for conservation biology and wildlife management. Understanding the movement ecology of animals following their release in novel terrain is critical to predicting the success of wildlife restoration efforts. Mountain caribou have high conservation value – efforts to restore their populations across we...
Understanding the size of animals' home ranges is vital for studies in ecology and conservation. Trapping datasets are an important source of information when targeting the biodiversity of an area, inconspicuous species, or high numbers of individuals in contrast to more expensive telemetry-based methods such as radio- or GPS-collaring. Currently,...
Background
Animal movement is a key ecological process that is tightly coupled to local environmental conditions. While agriculture, urbanisation, and transportation infrastructure are critical to human socio-economic improvement, these have spurred substantial changes in animal movement across the globe with potential impacts on fitness and surviv...
Home‐range estimates are a common product of animal tracking data, as each range represents the area needed by a given individual. Population‐level inference of home‐range areas—where multiple individual home ranges are considered to be sampled from a population—is also important to evaluate changes over time, space or covariates such as habitat qu...
Metaboloepigenetic regulation, has been reported in stem cells, germ cells and tumor cells. Embryonic metaboloepigenetics, however, have just begun to be described. Here we analyzed RNAseq data to characterize the metaboloepigenetic profiles of human, mouse and bovine pre-implantation embryos. In embryos, metaboloepigenetic reprogramming was specie...
Modern tracking devices allow for the collection of high‐volume animal tracking data at improved sampling rates over very‐high‐frequency radiotelemetry. Home range estimation is a key output from these tracking datasets, but the inherent properties of animal movement can lead traditional statistical methods to under‐ or overestimate home range area...
Animal movement is a key ecological process that is tightly coupled to local environmental conditions. While agriculture, urbanisation, and transportation infrastructure are critical to human socio-economic improvement, these have spurred substantial changes in animal movement across the globe with potential impacts on fitness and survival. Notably...
Comparing traits across species has been a hallmark of biological research for centuries. While interspecific comparisons can be highly informative, phylogenetic inertia can bias estimates if not properly accounted for in comparative analyses. In response, researchers typically treat phylogenetic inertia as a form of autocorrelation that can be det...
Wildlife‐vehicle collisions (WVCs) represent a serious source of mortality for many species, threatening local populations’ persistence while also carrying high economic and human safety costs. Animals may adapt their behaviour to road‐associated threats, but roadside resources can also attract individuals to dangerous roadside habitats, ultimately...
· Home-range estimates are a common product of animal tracking data, as each range informs on the area needed by a given individual. Population-level inference on home-range areas—where multiple individual home-ranges are considered to be sampled from a population—is also important to evaluate changes over time, space, or covariates, such as habita...
1. Modern tracking devices allow for the collection of high-volume animal tracking data at improved sampling rates over VHF radiotelemetry. Home range estimation is a key output from these tracking datasets, but the inherent properties of animal movement can lead traditional statistical methods to under- or overestimate home range areas. 2. The Aut...
Metaboloepigenetic regulation (metabolites regulating the cellular epigenome inducing long-term changes), has been reported in stem cells, germ cells and tumor cells. Embryonic metaboloepigenetics, however, have just begun to be described. Here we analyzed RNAseq data to characterize the metaboloepigenetic profiles of human, mouse and bovine pre-im...
Comparing traits across species has been a hallmark of biological research for centuries. While inter-specific comparisons can be highly informative, phylogenetic inertia can bias estimates if not properly accounted for in comparative analyses. In response, researchers typically treat phylogenetic inertia as a form of autocorrelation that can be de...
Wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) represent a serious source of mortality for many species, threatening local populations’ persistence while also carrying a high economic and human safety cost. Animals may adapt their behaviour to road associated threats, but roadside resources can act as attractants, providing misleading signals about the quality...
Ecologists have long been interested in linking individual behaviour with higher level processes. For motile species, this ‘upscaling’ is governed by how well any given movement strategy maximizes encounters with positive factors and minimizes encounters with negative factors. Despite the importance of encounter events for a broad range of ecologic...
Estimating animal home ranges is a primary purpose of collecting tracking data. Many widely used home range estimators, including conventional kernel density estimators, assume independently‐sampled data. In stark contrast, modern animal tracking datasets are almost always strongly autocorrelated. The incongruence between estimator assumptions and...
1. Ecologists have long been interested in linking individual behavior with higher-level processes. For motile species, this 'upscaling' is governed by how well any given movement strategy maximizes encounters with positive factors, and minimizes encounters with negative factors. Despite the importance of encounter events for a broad range of ecolo...
Accurately quantifying species’ area requirements is a prerequisite for effective area‐based conservation. This typically involves collecting tracking data on species of interest and then conducting home‐range analyses. Problematically, autocorrelation in tracking data can result in space needs being severely underestimated. Based on the previous w...
Animal tracking data are being collected more frequently, in greater detail, and on smaller taxa than ever before. These data hold the promise to increase the relevance of animal movement for understanding ecological processes, but this potential will only be fully realized if their accompanying location error is properly addressed. Historically, c...
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) contain multiple factors that regulate cell and tissue function. However, understanding of their influence on gametes, including communication with the oocyte, remains limited. In the present study, we characterized the proteome of domestic cat (Felis catus) follicular fluid EVs (ffEV). To determine the influence of fol...
Artificial insemination (AI) is a valuable tool for ex situ wildlife conservation, allowing the re-infusion and dissemination of genetic material, even after death of the donor. However, the application of AI to species conservation is still limited, due mainly to the poor survival of cryopreserved sperm. Recent work demonstrated that oviductal ext...
Estimating animal home ranges is a primary purpose of collecting tracking data. All conventional home range estimators in widespread usage, including minimum convex polygons and kernel density estimators, assume independently sampled data. In stark contrast, modern GPS animal tracking datasets are almost always strongly autocorrelated. This incongr...
Background: Speed and distance traveled provide quantifiable links between behavior and energetics, and are among the metrics most routinely estimated from animal tracking data. Researchers typically sum over the straight-line displacements (SLDs) between sampled locations to quantify distance traveled, while speed is estimated by dividing these di...
European badgers, Meles meles, are group-living in the UK, and demarcate their ranges with shared latrines. As carnivores, badgers possess paired anal glands, but olfactory information on the content of badger anal gland secretion (AGS) is largely uninvestigated. Here, we examined the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of AGS samples from 57 free-li...
Background
We present a cellular phone-enhanced GPS tracking system (GPS mobile with CTG-001G receiver triangulation) suitable for urban carnivores, in tandem with appropriate home range analysis, as an additional tracking technology option in metropolitan settings. We conduct this proof-of-concept study working with the management of introduced in...
Accurately quantifying species' area requirements is a prerequisite for effective area-based conservation. This typically involves collecting tracking data on species of interest and then conducting home-range analyses. Problematically, autocorrelation in tracking data can result in space needs being severely underestimated. Based on the previous w...
Technological advances have steadily increased the detail of animal tracking datasets, yet fundamental data limitations exist for many species that cause substantial biases in home‐range estimation. Specifically, the effective sample size of a range estimate is proportional to the number of observed range crossings, not the number of sampled locati...
Fertilization and early embryo development are regulated by a unique maternal-gamete/embryo cross-talk within the oviduct. Recent studies have shown that extracellular vesicles (EVs) within the oviduct play important roles in mediating this developmental process. Here, we examined the influence of oviductal EVs on sperm function in the domestic cat...
Home range estimation is routine practice in ecological research. While advances in animal tracking technology have increased our capacity to collect data to support home range analysis, these same advances have also resulted in increasingly autocorrelated data. Consequently, the question of which home range estimator to use on modern, highly autoc...
Aim
Animal movement is an important determinant of individual survival, population dynamics and ecosystem structure and function. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how local movements are related to resource availability and the spatial arrangement of resources. Using resident bird species and migratory bird species outside the migratory period, we...
While climatic effects on species biogeographic distributions are well documented,
less mobile species must compensate for climate change in situ via behavioral plasticity.
Despite this being a critical mechanism, behavioral plasticity is rarely modeled explicitly.
Here, we use novel accelerometer and active-RFID transponder technology to quantify...
Despite the routine nature of estimating overlapping space use in ecological research, to date no formal inferential framework for home range overlap has been available to ecologists. Part of this issue is due to the inherent difficulty of comparing the estimated home ranges that underpin overlap across individuals, studies, sites, species, and tim...
Wild-living animals are subject to weather variability that may cause the generation of reactive oxygen species, resulting in oxidative stress and tissue damage, potentially driving demographic responses. Our 3-yr field study investigated the effects of seasonal weather conditions on biomarkers for oxidative stress, oxidative damage, and antioxidan...
We demonstrate how different normalization techniques in GC‐MS analysis impart unique properties to the data, influencing any biological inference. Using simulations, and empirical data, we compare the most commonly used techniques (Total Sum Normalization ‘TSN’; Median Normalization ‘MN’; Probabilistic Quotient Normalization ‘PQN’; Internal Standa...