Robert Montgomery

University of Oxford | OX

The Coyote (Canis latrans) is one of the most studied species in North America with at least 445 papers on its diet alone. While this research has yielded excellent reviews of what coyotes eat, it has been inadequate to draw deeper conclusions because no synthesis to date has considered prey availability. We accounted for prey availability by inves...

Investigating spatial patterns of animal occupancy and reproduction in peripheral populations can provide insight into factors that form species range boundaries. Following historical extirpation, American black bears ( Ursus americanus ) recolonized the western Great Basin in Nevada from the Sierra Nevada during the late 1900s. This range expansio...

The various debates around model selection paradigms are important, but in lieu of a consensus, there is a demonstrable need for a deeper appreciation of existing approaches, at least among the end-users of statistics and model selection tools. In the ecological literature, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) dominates model selection practices,...

Few topics in wildlife conservation are as controversial, emotive, or command as much public and political attention, as trophy hunting. International discourses regarding trophy hunting are characterised by radically contradictory assertions, ranging from claims that trophy hunting is a humane and socially acceptable wildlife management tool which...

Context Animal-habitat relationships tend to manifest at specific spatial scales. Accurately identifying these scales and accounting for the variance in habitat selection across them is crucial for linking habitat selection patterns to the ecological processes giving rise to them. Although this fundamental issue has long been recognized, it has bee...

Global dependence upon fossil fuels persists in the 21st century. With known deposits of oil diminishing, technological advancements and alternative financing have facilitated explorations into a number of sensitive habitats around the world. Such pursuits challenge global priorities relating to the ideals of energy production versus those of biodi...

Quantifying animal movement is a central component of ecological inquiry. Movement patterns provide insights into how animals make habitat decisions in pursuit of their life‐history requirements. Within this context, animals are expected to modulate their movement when navigating landscape complexities like steep or uneven slopes. However, the anal...

Unsustainable hunting, both illegal and legal, has led to the extirpation of many species. In the last 35 years giraffe Giraffa spp. populations have declined precipitously, with extinctions documented in seven African countries. Amongst the various reasons for these population declines, poaching is believed to play an important role in some areas....

In the first 2 decades of the twenty‐first century, American black bear ( Ursus americanus ) populations rebounded with range expansions into areas where the species was previously extirpated. While there are a number of factors that limit range expansion, habitat quality and availability are among the most important. Such factors may be particular...

Changes in topography, such as terrain elevation and slope, are an important source of landscape complexity influencing the ecology of animals, particularly in mountainous landscapes. In such landscapes animals navigate changes in elevation and slope in their daily movement. Despite the importance of topographic variation, studies of animal ecology...

Illegal harvest (poaching) is a geographically widespread threat to animal populations. Wire snares are a common poaching technique used in the Global South and are indiscriminate with respect to species, age, and sex of individual animals that they capture. When caught, relatively large mammals frequently break free from the snares, suffering inju...

Olfaction is a key sense, enabling animals to locate forage, select mates, navigate their environment, and avoid predation. Wind is an important abiotic factor that modulates the strength of olfactory information detected by animals. In theory, when airflow is unidirectional, an animal can increase odor detection probability and maximize the amount...

Body size variation is an enigma. We do not understand why species achieve the sizes they do, and this means we also do not understand the circumstances under which gigantism or dwarfism is selected. We develop size-structured integral projection models to explore evolution of body size and life history speed. We make few assumptions and keep model...

Subsistence poaching threatens the persistence of wildlife populations worldwide and the well-being of people who participate in poaching. We conducted interviews around Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda to assess the acceptability of poaching. Conflict with wildlife was the most important factor determining attitudes towards poaching and the t...

Because biodiversity loss has largely been attributed to human actions, people, particularly those in the Global South, are regularly depicted as threats to conservation. This context has facilitated rapid growth in green militarization, with fierce crackdowns against real or perceived environmental offenders. We designed an undergraduate course to...

Animal movement models can be used to understand species behavior and assist with implementation of management activities. We explored behavioral states of an invasive wild pig (Sus scrofa) population that recently colonized central Michigan, USA, 2014–2018. To quantify environmental factors related to wild pig movement ecology and spatio‐temporal...

Facilitating coexistence between humans and large carnivores is one of the most complex and pressing conservation issues globally. Large carnivores pose threats to human security and private property, and people may respond to those risks with retaliation which can jeopardize the persistence of carnivore populations. The nature of these interaction...

We synthesize data on the ecology of large carnivores in the Tarangire Ecosystem (TE). Despite anthropogenic pressures, all large carnivore species (lions Panthera leo, spotted hyena Crocuta crocuta, striped hyena Hyena hyena, leopard Panthera pardus, cheetah Acinonyx jubatus, and wild dog Lycaon pictus) have persisted in this fragmented ecosystem...

Carnivore depredation of livestock is one of the primary drivers of human-carnivore conflict globally, threatening the well-being of livestock owners, and fueling large carnivore population declines. Interventions designed to reduce carnivore depredation typically center around predictions of depredation risk. However, these spatial risk models ten...

Body size variation is an enigma. We do not understand why species achieve the sizes they do, and this means we also do not understand the circumstances under which gigantism or dwarfism is selected. We develop size-structured integral projection models to explore evolution of body size and life history speed. We make few assumptions and keep model...

Carnivore population declines are a time-sensitive global challenge in which mitigating decreasing populations requires alignment of applied practice and research priorities. However, large carnivore conservation is hindered by gaps among research, conservation practice and policy formation. One potential driver of this research–implementation gap...

Context: The measurement of home range size and configuration has been a powerful and enduring method of quantifying animal-habitat relationships. Traditionally, home range estimators have been built using bivariate location data (e.g., x-y coordinates) which inherently assumes that animal movement is two-dimensional (2D). However, this is not repr...

In promoting coexistence, sympatric species often partition shared resources along spatio-temporal domains. Similarly sized and phylogenetically close species, for instance, partition the times of day in which they are active to limit interference competition. Given that variation in species body mass has evolutionary underpinnings, species activit...

When seeking prey, predators adaptively deploy strategies coarsely divided into sit-and-wait, sit-and-pursue, or active hunting modes. Though the hunting modes of many predators have been extensively studied, the implications of the hunting modes of human (Homo sapiens) predation are not yet fully understood. We conducted an extensive literature re...

Conflict with humans and habitat fragmentation are major threats to large carnivores in Africa, and transboundary protected areas may ease some of the space requirements for individual countries. The W‐Arly‐Pendjari complex (WAP) in West Africa sits across Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger and is the last regional stronghold for many species, including...

In recent years, conservationists have been taking an increasingly holistic, interdisciplinary approach to conservation science, utilizing many methodologies and techniques from the social sciences. Reflexivity is one social science technique that holds great potential to aid in the continued advancement of conservation science but is not yet commo...

Rates at which predators encounter, hunt and kill prey are influenced by, among other things, the intrinsic condition of prey. Diseases can considerably compromise body condition, potentially weakening ability of afflicted prey to avoid predation. Understanding predator–prey dynamics is particularly important when both species are threatened, as is...

Both African elephants ( Loxodonta spp.) and the Asian elephant ( Elephas maximus ) across their range come into conflict with people because of their crop-raiding behavior, which presents profound impediments to farmer livelihoods. In response, a series of interventions, designed to reduce elephant crop raiding have been applied. Based on an exten...

Home ranges provide a conceptual and quantitative representation of animal‐habitat associations over time. Methods to estimate home ranges have swiftly progressed by dynamically accounting for various sources of bias. Across that period of growth, one potentially influential source of bias has yet to be robustly scrutinized. Animals inhabiting the...

Recent research has highlighted several influential roles that humans play in ecosystems, including that of a superpredator, hyperkeystone species, and niche constructor. This work has begun to describe the Eltonian niche of humans, which encompasses humanity's cumulative ecological and evolutionary roles in trophic systems. However, we lack a unif...

Apex predators can shape communities via cascading top–down effects, but the degree to which such effects depend on predator life history traits is largely unknown. Within carnivore guilds, complex hierarchies of dominance facilitate coexistence, whereby subordinate species avoid dominant counterparts by partitioning space, time, or both. We invest...

Despite the key roles that dispersal plays in individual animal fitness and meta‐population gene flow, it remains one of the least understood behaviors in many species. In large mammalian herbivores, dispersals might span long distances and thereby influence landscape‐level ecological processes, such as infectious disease spread. Here, we describe...

Understanding traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles in our modern world is fundamental to our understanding of their viability, as well as the role of humans as predators in structuring ecosystems. Here, we examine the factors that drive prey preferences of modern hunter-gatherer people by reviewing 85 published studies from 161 tropical, temperat...

Fear of predators fundamentally shapes the ecology of prey species and drives both inter‐ and intra‐specific interactions. Extensive research has examined the consequences of predation risk from large carnivores on the behavior of wild ungulate prey species. However, many large carnivores not only hunt wild prey but also depredate domestic livestoc...

Lockdown measures fundamentally reshaped human society during the COVID-19 pandemic. We present a framework featuring seven animal behavioral changes to the calming effect of the lockdowns on human actions (COVID-19 quietus). We demonstrate how this framework can be used to quantify animal behavioral responses with implications for ecology and cons...

Pastoralists and their livestock have long competed with wildlife over access to grazing on shared rangelands. In the dynamic 21st century however, the configuration and quality of these rangelands is changing rapidly. Climate change processes, human range expansion, and the fragmentation and degradation of rangeland habitat have increased competit...

Historically, undergraduate college students enrolled in natural resources programs came from rural backgrounds and regularly participated in fishing, hunting, and trapping (i.e., consumptive activities). Student demographics shifted considerably over the past 30 years, with more natural resources students coming from urban backgrounds with lower l...

In the process of avoiding predation, prey are faced with potentially fitness‐compromising trade‐offs that have implications for their survival and reproduction. The nature and strength of these non‐consumptive effects at the population level can be equivalent, or even greater, than consumptive effects. Many prey species have evolved defence mechan...

The movement of animals is restricted to the aerial, aquatic, subterranean, and terrestrial spatial domains to which they are evolutionarily adapted. Within each spatial domain, animals can move amongst landscapes comprised of fractals exceeding two dimensions (i.e., 2D+). Prevailing quantitative techniques however, tend to predict animal movement...

Poaching of wildlife presents one of the biggest conservation challenges in the 21st century. Snaring is one of the primary means of capturing target animals. To prioritise interventions intending to reduce snaring, we describe an approach for quantifying the configuration and lethality of snares. We conducted transect surveys in Murchison Falls Na...

We used multiple methods to examine livestock depredation by African lions ( Panthera leo ), spotted hyaenas ( Crocuta crocuta ), leopards ( Panthera pardus ) and black‐backed jackals ( Canis mesomelas ) in livestock enclosures across the Maasai steppe of Northern Tanzania. In this landscape, pastoralists keep cattle, goats, sheep and donkeys. All...

Foundational work has examined adaptive social behavior in animals in relation to the costs and benefits of group living. Within this context, a “group” of animals represents an organizational unit that is integral to the study of animal ecology and evolution. Definitions of animal group sizes are often subjective with considerable variability with...

Many have stridently recommended banning markets like the one where COVID-19 originally spread. We highlight that millions of people around the world depend on markets for subsistence and the diverse use of animals globally defies uniform bans. We argue that the immediate and fair priority is critical scrutiny of wildlife trade.

Among science and society, poaching is often depicted as one big dark conservation problem. In actuality, there are three main categories of poaching, with innumerable subcategories, including trophy, medicative, and consumptive poaching. Recognition of the complexity of poaching is vital to the effective alignment of conservation practice and soci...

In North America, wild pigs (Sus scrofa; feral pigs, feral swine, wild boars) are a widespread exotic species capable of creating large‐scale biotic and abiotic landscape perturbations. Quantification of wild pig environmental effects has been particularly problematic in northern climates, where they occur only recently as localized populations at...

Coexistence of people and large carnivores depends on a complex combination of factors that vary geographically. Both the number and range of the Asiatic lion Panthera leo leo in the Greater Gir landscape, India, has increased since the 1990s. The challenge has been managing the success of conservation, with a particular focus on the spillover popu...

Genetic differentiation plays an integral role in species persistence. However, it remains challenging to quantify the ways in which the degree of isolation affects animal populations. The Common Toad (Bufo bufo) is a species of conservation concern, particularly in the UK, where populations have undergone large-scale declines. There are two types...

Conservation projects subscribing to a community‐based paradigm have predominated in the 21st century. Here, we examine the context in which the phrase was coined and trace its growth over time. We found that the phrase ‘community‐based conservation’ first appeared in the literature in 1993 and existed for a decade without much growth. However, aft...

Quantifying the distribution and size of home ranges is critical for understanding animal spatial dynamics. This is particularly important for large carnivores that reside in fragmented landscapes. Most studies that estimate home range consider only a bivariate frequency distribution represented by a two-dimensional planimetric surface. The underly...

In November 1928, Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt led an expedition to China with the expressed purpose of being the first Westerners to kill the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). The expedition lasted 8 months and resulted in the brothers shooting a giant panda in the mountains of Sichuan Province. Given the concurrent attention in the popul...

Prey modify their behavior in response to variation in predation risk, and such modifications can affect trophic processes such as disease transmission. However, variation in predation risk is complex, arising from direct risk from the predator itself and indirect risk due to the environment. Moreover, direct risk typically stems from multiple pred...

ContextCamera traps are one of the most popular tools used to study wildlife worldwide. Numerous recent studies have evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of camera traps as a research tool. Nonetheless, important aspects of camera-trap methodology remain in need of critical investigation. One such issue relates to camera-trap viewshed visibil...

The 'Compassionate Conservation' movement is gaining momentum through its promotion of 'ethical' conservation practices based on self-proclaimed principles of 'first-do-no-harm' and 'individuals matter'. We argue that the tenets of 'Compassionate Conservation' are ideological-that is, they are not scientifically proven to improve conservation outco...

This chapter summarizes information on the behaviors and spatial ecology of wild pigs in North America. It focuses on free-ranging pigs and provides relevant research on captive animals and from other wild pig populations worldwide, both native and non-native, to provide a thorough synthesis of the primary topics concerning behaviors and the spatia...

Carnivore depredation of livestock is a global problem which negatively impacts both agropastoral livelihoods and carnivore population viability. Given the gravity of this issue, research has increasingly focused on applied techniques capable of quantifying the factors that increase the risk of livestock depredation. One such technique is risk mode...

Spatial scale is fundamental in understanding species–landscape relationships because species’ responses to landscape characteristics typically vary across scales. Nonetheless, such scales are often unidentified or unreliably predicted by theory. Many landscapes worldwide are urbanizing, yet the spatial scaling of species’ responses to urbanization...

Теоретические и эмпирические исследования показывают, что распределение хищников в значительной степени определяется доступностью основных видов жертв. Доступность зависит не только от плотности населения животных, но также от их уязвимости, на которую влияет конфигурация атрибутов ландшафта, увеличивающих шанс удачной охоты для хищника. Остается п...

Invasive predators are among the most detrimental biological invaders of island ecosystems. However, information detailing the effectiveness of trapping for these invasive species is often underreported. Here, we quantified the influence of environmental features on mongoose (Herpestes auropunctatus) trapping success across five forest types in eas...

Suburban landscapes can alter spatial patterns by white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and increase animal contact with vectors, pathogens, and humans. Close-contact relationships at a landscape level can have broad implications for disease epidemiology. From 1995–1999, we captured and radio-collared 41 deer in two suburban forest preserves i...

Developing techniques to quantify the spread and severity of diseases afflicting wildlife populations is important for disease ecology, animal ecology, and conservation. Giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) are in the midst of a dramatic decline, but it is not known whether disease is playing an important role in the broad-scale population reductions....

Human-carnivore conflicts and retaliatory killings contribute to carnivore popula-tions' declines around the world. Strategies to mitigate conflicts have been developed, but their efficacy is rarely assessed in a randomized case-control design. Further, the economic costs prevent the adoption and wide use of conflict mitigation strategies by pastor...

Wicked socio-ecological problems are inherently complex and require an interdisciplinary approach for mitigation. Here, we investigated the many drivers of human-lion conflict in East Africa and present a novel conceptual model illustrating the intricate interactions within and between the five main dimensions of conflict. We highlight the importan...

Compassionate conservation focuses on 4 tenets: first, do no harm; individuals matter; inclusivity of individual animals; and peaceful coexistence between humans and animals. Recently, compassionate conservation has been promoted as an alternative to conventional conservation philosophy. We believe examples presented by compassionate conservationis...

Conflict with humans is one of the primary reasons why large carnivore populations are declining worldwide. Rates of human‐carnivore conflict ( HCC ) are particularly high in East Africa, where human settlements tend to surround protected areas, maximizing potential for human‐carnivore interactions. Despite extensive HCC research in this region, HC...

Science (E-letter) https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6438/eaav5570/tab-e-letters Rewilding needs to clarify the role of management of invasive species Matt W. Hayward, Associate Professor of Conservation Biology, University of Newcastle, Australia Other Contributors: David S. Jachowski, Professor of Conservation, Clemson University Craig...

Predation is a fundamental force exerting strong selective pressure on prey populations. Predators not only kill prey, triggering lethal effects, but also hunt prey which can induce risk effects. Foundational research has documented the importance of risk effects in predator-prey systems of arthropods, fish, birds, and rodents, among others. Risk e...

Rewilding is emerging as a major issue in conservation. However, there are currently a dozen definitions of rewilding that include Pleistocene rewilding, island rewilding, trophic rewilding, functional rewilding and passive rewilding, and these remain fuzzy, lack clarity and, hence, hinder scientific discourse. Based on current definitions, it is u...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly called drones, have generated a great deal of controversy, partly because of their use for military and police purposes and because of concerns that they pose threats to privacy and safety. At the same time, environmental scientists are finding drones to be a powerful research tool. Because the use of drone...

Rising ambient temperatures associated with global climate change threaten the persistence of numerous species of wildlife. Moose (Alces alces), for instance, are purported to experience heat stress occurring when ambient temperatures rise above specific seasonal temperature thresholds. These temperature thresholds, however, were established in a s...