Nathan Ranc

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Engineer at French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)

The recovery of wolves (Canis lupus) across Europe is a notable conservation success in a region with extensive human alteration of landscapes and high human population densities. We provide a comprehensive update on wolf populations in Europe, estimated at over 21,500 individuals by 2022, representing a 58% increase over the past decade. Despite t...

Background Parental care is indispensable for the survival and development of dependent offspring, often requiring a delicate balance of time and energy allocation towards offspring by parents. Among ungulates employing a hider strategy, deciding when and where to provide care while also maintaining a sufficient distance to not reveal the offspring...

In human‐dominated landscapes, rebounding bear populations share space with people, which may lead to bear–human conflicts and, consequently, a decrease in acceptance and an increase in bear mortality linked to human causes. Previous analyses of brown bear (Ursus arctos) movement data have shown that bears adopt a security‐food trade‐off strategy i...

The report Large carnivore distribution maps and population updates 2017 – 2022/23 is based on the latest information and provides the best available overview of brown bear (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), wolf (Canis lupus), golden jackal (Canis aureus), and wolverine (Gulo gulo) distributions and population sizes at a European continent...

While territoriality is one of the key mechanisms influencing carnivore space use, most studies quantify resource selection and movement in the absence of conspecific influence or territorial structure. Our analysis incorporated social information in a resource selection framework to investigate mechanisms of territoriality and intra‐specific compe...

Most animals live in spatially-constrained home ranges. The prevalence of this space-use pattern in nature suggests that general biological mechanisms are likely to be responsible for their occurrence. Individual-based models of animal movement in both theoretical and empirical settings have demonstrated that the revisitation of familiar areas thro...

The Eurasian golden jackal ( Canis aureus ) has been rapidly expanding its distribution range in Europe. Whether jackals will be able to adapt to new environmental conditions in northern Europe remains largely unresolved. Herein we provide additional evidence for the species’ ability to colonize northern environments by presenting the new records o...

Context The Complementary Habitat Hypothesis posits that animals access resources for different needs by moving between complementary habitats that can be seen as ‘resource composites’. These movements can occur over a range of temporal scales, from diurnal to seasonal, in response to multiple drivers such as access to food, weather constraints, ri...

Context The Complementary Habitat Hypothesis posits that animals access resources for different needs by moving between complementary habitats that can be seen as ‘resource composites’. These movements can occur on a range of temporal scales, from diurnal to seasonal, responding to multiple drivers, such as access to food, weather constraints, risk...

Trans‐Saharan migratory bird species encounter large scale seasonal atmospheric convergence zones, where opposing monsoon and continental air masses meet. These macro‐scale atmospheric conditions determine local weather, influence migratory and foraging behaviour and seasonal bird survival rates. Here, we investigate the flight behaviour of pallid...

Aim Ongoing global changes can lead to the expansion of species' geographical range. Exploring the drivers of the successful ongoing expansion of the golden jackal across Europe is essential to understand the species' trophic ecology. We analysed which climatic and environmental factors affected the dietary composition of golden jackals and compare...

Regular assessments of species’ status are an essential component of conservation planning and adaptive management. They allow the progress of past or ongoing conservation actions to be evaluated and can be used to redirect and prioritise future conservation actions. Most countries perform periodic assessments for their own national adaptive manage...

Most animals live in home ranges, and memory is thought to be an important process in their formation. However, a general memory‐based model for characterising and predicting home range emergence has been lacking. Here, we use a mechanistic movement model to: (1) quantify the role of memory in the movements of a large mammal reintroduced into a nov...

Golden jackals (Canis aureus) are undergoing a rapid range expansion in Europe, with the core of the expansion currently taking place in the Pannonian basin, and long-distance dispersers being noticed throughout the continent. In parallel, a dynamic nucleus has formed hundreds of kilometers away from source populations in Estonia. This northernmost...

Background Human disturbance alters animal movement globally and infrastructure, such as roads, can act as physical barriers that impact behaviour across multiple spatial scales. In ungulates, roads can particularly hamper key ecological processes such as dispersal and migration, which ensure functional connectivity among populations, and may be pa...

When navigating heterogeneous landscapes, large carnivores must balance trade‐offs between multiple goals, including minimizing energetic expenditure, maintaining access to hunting opportunities and avoiding potential risk from humans. The relative importance of these goals in driving carnivore movement likely changes across temporal scales, but ou...

Translocated animals undergo a phase of behavioral adjustment after being released in a novel environment, initially prioritizing exploration and gradually shifting toward resource exploitation. This transition has been termed post-release behavioral modification. Post-release behavioral modification may also manifest as changes in habitat selectio...

Humans have outsized effects on ecosystems, in part by initiating trophic cascades that impact all levels of the food chain.¹ • Ripple W.J. • Estes J.A. • Beschta R.L. • Wilmers C.C. • Ritchie E.G. • Hebblewhite M. • Berger J. • Elmhagen B. • Letnic M. • Nelson M.P. • et al. Status and ecological effects of the world’s largest carnivores.Science....

Competitively dominant carnivore species can limit the population sizes and alter the behavior of inferior competitors. Established mechanisms that enable carnivore coexistence include spatial and temporal avoidance of dominant predator species by subordinates, and dietary niche separation. However, spatial heterogeneity across landscapes could pro...

Significance Understanding how animals respond to changes in resource availability is central to ecological research and to designing effective wildlife conservation and management strategies. To date, little research has been conducted on the cognitive mechanisms—memory or perception—by which large mammals make foraging decisions in nature. By com...

During the last half-century, the distribution of golden jackals (Canis aureus) has rapidly increased throughout Europe. Today, golden jackals are thriving in human-dominated landscapes across Southeastern and Central Europe. Most studies on golden jackals have focused on large-scale distribution patterns; to date, little is known about the species...

Aim The recent recovery of large carnivores in Europe has been explained as resulting from a decrease in human persecution driven by widespread rural land abandonment, paralleled by forest cover increase and the consequent increase in availability of shelter and prey. We investigated whether land cover and human population density changes are relat...

In Focus: Ellison, N., Hatchwell, B. J., Biddiscombe, S. J., Napper, C. J., & Potts, J. R. (2020). Mechanistic home range analysis reveals drivers of space use patterns for a non‐territorial passerine. Journal of Animal Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365‐2656.13292. Most animals for which space use has been studied restrict their movements into...

Simple Summary Supplementary feeding of ungulates is widespread in many European countries. However, little is known on the actual patterns of use of feeding sites by animals, and the effects of this practice on inter-individual relationships. We monitored the use of feeding sites in a population of roe deer living in the Italian Alps using camera...

Most animals live in a characteristic home range, a space-use pattern thought to emerge from the benefits of memory-based movements; however, a general model for characterizing and predicting their formation in the absence of territoriality has been lacking. Here, we use a mechanistic movement model to quantify the role of memory in the movements o...

The link between spatio-temporal resource patterns and animal movement behaviour is a key ecological process, however, limited experimental support for this connection has been produced at the home range scale. In this study, we analysed the spatial responses of a resident large herbivore (roe deer Capreolus capreolus) using an in situ manipulation...

The link between spatio-temporal resource patterns and animal movement behaviour is a key ecological process, however, limited experimental support for this connection has been produced at the home range scale. In this study, we analysed the spatial responses of a resident large herbivore (roe deer Capreolus capreolus) using an in situ manipulation...

Many animals restrict their movements to a characteristic home range. This pattern of constrained space-use is thought to result from the foraging benefits of memorizing the locations and quality of heterogeneously distributed resources. However, due to the confounding effects of sensory perception, the role of memory in home range movement behavio...

Restricting movements to familiar areas should increase individual fitness as it provides animals with information about the spatial distribution of resources and predation risk. While the benefits of familiarity for locating resources have been reported previously, the potential value of familiarity for predation avoidance has been accorded less a...

The link between spatio-temporal resource patterns and movement behaviour is a key ecological process, however, limited experimental support has been produced at the home range scale. In this study, we analysed the spatial responses of a resident large herbivore (roe deer Capreolus capreolus ) during an in situ manipulation of a concentrated food r...

We present methodological advances to a recently developed framework to study sequential habitat use by animals using a visually-explicit and tree-based Sequence Analysis Method (SAM), derived from molecular biology and more recently used in time geography. Habitat use sequences are expressed as annotations obtained by intersecting GPS movement tra...

https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/118264161/133235906

The Eurasian golden jackal (Canis aureus) is currently undergoing a rapid range expansion. Originally restricted to small coastal areas of the Mediterranean and Black seas, this highly adaptive and generalist species is now reproducing throughout Southeastern and Central Europe. In addition, individuals are being seen further to the North and West....

Although the presence of golden jackals (Canis aureus) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) has been recorded since the 1970s, significant increase has been noted only during the last ten years, as indicated by the increased number of shot jackals. In the past, only the southern parts of the country were inhabited, while today the core area appears to b...

Provisional clustering of the abstracts, external use (Corresponding Authors) Legend: First letter= the day of presentation, 2nd digit = the session, 3rd or 3rd and 4th digits =the order, next letter = type of presentation (K Keynote, C oral communication, P poster), digits after letter = duration. Example: W110C5 Wednesday in the first session,...

The distribution of the golden jackal (Canis aureus) has dramatically changed in last decades. As a generalist and opportunistic species, jackal is capable to colonize wide range of habitats and exploit wide range of food resources. Its historic distribution was restricted to the southeastern Europe, mostly along the Adriatic and Black sea coasts a...

We present a framework for the partitioning of a spatial trajectory in a sequence of segments based on spatial density and temporal criteria. The result is a set of temporally separated clusters interleaved by sub-sequences of unclustered points. A major novelty is the proposal of an outlier or noise model based on the distinction between intra-clu...

We present a framework for the partitioning of a spatial trajectory in a sequence of segments based on spatial density and temporal criteria. The result is a set of temporally separated clusters interleaved by sub-sequences of unclustered points. A major novelty is the proposal of an outlier or noise model based on the distinction between intra-clu...

The golden jackal’s Canis aureus range in Europe is expanding rapidly and populations are increasing. Historically restricted to the Mediterranean and Black sea coastal regions [1], jackals are now reproducing in most of Southeastern European and some Central European countries [2-4]. Current population trends suggest that population expansion is f...

Supplemental feeding for ungulates is a widespread practice in many human-dominated landscapes across Europe and North America, mainly intended to seasonally support populations. Surprisingly, little consideration was given so far to the effect of supplemental feeding on ungulate spatial ecology at a large scale, in management and conservation stud...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are often calibrated using presence‐only datasets plagued with environmental sampling bias, which leads to a decrease of model accuracy. In order to compensate for this bias, it has been suggested that background data (or pseudoabsences) should represent the area that has been sampled. However, spatially‐explicit...

Digital tracking technologies have considerably increased the amount and quality of movement trajectories, improving our abilities to study any type of moving objects. A study field that has been largely reshaped in that context is animal ecology. Complex concepts such as habitat use are becoming increasingly clear due to availability of fine-scale...

Urbanisation and climate change are two global change processes that affect animal distributions, posing critical threats to biodiversity. Due to its versatile ecology and synurbic habits, Kuhl’s pipistrelle (Pipistrellus kuhlii) offers a unique opportunity to explore the relative effects of climate change and urbanisation on species distributions....

We present MigrO, a clustering environment for the extraction of individual mobility patterns from GPS trajectories, relying on the notion of stay region [1]. A stay region is an 'attractive' area where the moving object resides for a period, possibly experiencing arbitrary long periods of absence , before moving to a more attractive stay region. T...

The golden jackal’s Canis aureus range in Europe is expanding rapidly. Historically restricted to the Mediterranean and Black sea coastal regions, golden jackals are now reproducing in most of Southeastern European and some Central European countries. In addition, vagrant animals have been detected further to the north and west (Estonia, Germany, S...

1.Digital tracking technologies have considerably increased the amount and quality of animal trajectories, enabling the study of habitat use and habitat selection at a fine spatial and temporal scale. However, current approaches do not yet explicitly account for a key aspect of habitat use, namely the sequential variation in the use of different ha...