
Russell HillDurham University | DU · Department of Anthropology
Russell Hill
MPhil PhD
About
144
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
October 2017 - present
August 2007 - September 2017
April 2006 - July 2007
Education
October 1995 - September 1999
Publications
Publications (144)
Research has previously documented that across a range of Olympic combat sports, wearing red is associated with a higher probability of winning contests, especially when bouts are close. Yet, the hypothesis for a red advantage has not been systematically examined across multiple tournaments. Here, we report 6,589 contest outcomes for boxing, taekwo...
Biological invasions impact ecosystems worldwide, including through changing the behaviour of native species. Here, we used camera traps to investigate the effects of invasive Opuntia cacti on the habitat use of twelve mammal species in Laikipia County, Kenya, an internationally important region of mammalian biodiversity. We found that Opuntia impa...
Animal vigilance is often investigated under a narrow set of scenarios, but this approach may overestimate its contribution to animal lives. A solution may be to sample all looking behaviours and investigate numerous competing hypotheses in a single analysis. In this study, using a wild group of habituated chacma baboons (Papio ursinus griseipes) a...
Individual behavioral plasticity enables animals to adjust to different scenarios. Yet, personality traits limit this flexibility, leading to consistent interindividual differences in behavior. These individual behavioral traits have the potential to govern community interactions, although testing this is difficult in complex natural systems. For l...
Protected areas are traditionally the foundation of conservation strategy, but land not formally protected is of particular importance for the conservation of large carnivores because of their typically wide-ranging nature. In South Africa, leopard (Panthera pardus) population decreases are thought to be occurring in areas of human development and...
Conservation funding is currently limited; cost-effective conservation solutions are essential. We suggest that the thousands of field stations worldwide can play key roles at the frontline of biodiversity conservation and have high intrinsic value. We assessed field stations’ conservation return on investment and explored the impact of COVID-19. W...
Camera traps have great potential for generating wildlife insights by providing high resolution site‐specific data. Methods of data collection and analysis reliant on these tools for population density estimation can be relatively resource intensive, hindering their mainstream adoption.
Here, we explore the potential of population density estimates...
Africa’s paleo-climate change represents an “ecological black-box” along the evolutionary timeline of spoken language; a vocal hominid went in and, millions of years later, out came a verbal human. It is unknown whether or how a shift from forested, dense habitats towards drier, open ones affected hominid vocal communication, potentially setting st...
Mesocarnivores are of particular interest in wildlife management. Their adaptability makes them a focus of public attention globally, as negative interactions with people occur regularly, but their importance to wider ecosystem function is increasingly apparent. Robust methods for estimating mesocarnivore densities are essential for long‐term manag...
The impact of human activity on wildlife has been an area of scientific investigation for decades. Findings remain mixed, although most report changes in animal behaviour in response to human activity, typically characterised by changes in activity patterns to spatially or temporally avoid humans or areas associated with humans. Nevertheless, such...
Occupancy models are a vital tool for ecologists studying the patterns and drivers of species occurrence, but their use often involves selecting among models with different sets of occupancy and detection covariates. The information‐theoretic approach, which employs information criteria such as Akaike's information criterion (AIC) is arguably the m...
1. In light of global biodiversity loss, there is an increasing need for large-scale wildlife monitoring. This is difficult for mammals, since they can be elusive and nocturnal. In the United Kingdom, there is a lack of systematic, widespread mammal monitoring, and a recognized deficiency of data. Innovative new approaches are required.
2. We devel...
Abstract Camera traps are increasingly used in wildlife monitoring and citizen science to address an array of ecological questions on a wide variety of species. However, despite the ability of modern camera traps to capture high‐quality video, the majority of studies collect still images, in part because of concerns with video performance. We condu...
Environmental challenges are often associated with physiological changes in wildlife that allow animals to maintain homeostasis. Among these, scarcity in resources, and risks from predators, competitors, and humans can all result in psychological and physiological stress. Yet, for habituated species, it is not clear whether this relationship with h...
Meat-eating among non-human primates has been well documented but its prevalence among Afromontane baboons is understudied. In this study we report the predatory and meat-eating behaviours of a habituated group of gray-footed chacma baboons ( Papio ursinus griseipes ) living in an Afromontane environment in South Africa. We calculated a vertebrate-...
Social network analysis is an increasingly popular tool for behavioural ecologists exploring the social organisation of animal populations. Such analyses require data on inter-individual association patterns, which in wild populations are often collected using direct observations of habituated animals. This assumes observers have no influence on an...
Abstract Accurate and precise density estimates are crucial for effective species management and conservation. However, efficient monitoring of mammal densities over large spatial and temporal scales is challenging. In the United Kingdom, published density estimates for many mammals, including species considered to be common, are imprecise. Camera...
Foraging by wildlife on anthropogenic foods can have negative impacts on both humans and wildlife. Addressing this issue requires reliable data on the patterns of anthropogenic foraging by wild animals, but while direct observation by researchers can be highly accurate, this method is also costly and labor‐intensive, making it impractical in the lo...
Occupancy models are a vital tool for understanding the patterns and drivers of species occurrence, but their use requires a method for model selection – choosing between models with different sets of occupancy and detection covariates. The information-theoretic approach, which employs information criteria such as Akaike’s Information Criterion (AI...
Prey species must often face a trade‐off between acquiring resources and minimizing predation risk. The spatial variation in predation risk across a landscape, as perceived by prey across their foraging or home range, creates a “landscape of fear” by which individuals modify their behavior in response to the level of perceived risk. Here, we explor...
Flight initiation distance (FID) procedures are used to assess the risk perception animals have for threats (e.g., natural predators, hunters), but it is unclear whether these assessments remain meaningful if animals have habituated to certain human stimuli (e.g., researchers, tourists). Our previous work showed that habituated baboons displayed in...
Animals use vigilance to detect or monitor threats. While numerous aspects of vigilance have been studied across a wide range of species, little work has explored the methodological variation that has emerged across these studies. Different approaches in sampling designs, statistical analyses and definitions can make cross-study comparisons challen...
Populations of carnivore species outside protected areas may be of considerable importance for conservation, as many protected areas do not provide sufficient space for viable populations. Data on carnivore population sizes and trends are often biased towards protected areas, and few studies have examined the role of unprotected areas for carnivore...
Samango monkeys (Cercopithecus albogularis schwarzi) in the Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa, experience a highly seasonal climate, with relatively cold, dry winters. They must show behavioural flexibility to survive these difficult conditions near the southern limit of the species’ distribution and maintain the minimum nutritional intake they...
Aim
As habitat loss continues to accelerate with global human population growth, identifying landscape characteristics that influence species occurrence is a key conservation priority in order to prevent global biodiversity loss. In South Africa, the arboreal samango monkey (Cercopithecus albogularis sp.) is threatened due to loss and fragmentation...
The spread of invasive species is a threat to ecosystems worldwide. However, we know relatively little about how invasive species affect the behaviour of native animals, even though behaviour plays a vital role in the biotic interactions which are key to understanding the causes and impacts of biological invasions. Here, we explore how invasive pla...
Wildlife population density estimates provide information on the number of individuals in an area and influence conservation management decisions. Thus, accuracy is vital. A dominant feature in many landscapes globally is fencing, yet the implications of fence permeability on density estimation using spatial capture‐recapture modelling are seldom c...
Detecting predators requires information, and many behavioral and environmental features are predicted to enhance or limit an animal’s ability to learn about potential danger. Animals living in groups are thought to be at an advantage for learning about predator presence, but individual safety also depends on cues spreading from detectors to nondet...
Crop‐foraging by animals is a leading cause of human–wildlife “conflict” globally, affecting farmers and resulting in the death of many animals in retaliation, including primates. Despite significant research into crop‐foraging by primates, relatively little is understood about the behavior and movements of primates in and around crop fields, large...
Negative interactions between crop farmers and wild primates are an issue of significant concern. Despite many crop farmers using field guards as a method of crop protection against foraging primates, there are very few published accounts of how effective this technique is and how it might be improved. To bridge this knowledge gap, we used direct o...
Conflict between crop farmers and wild nonhuman primates is a worldwide conservation issue of increasing concern. Most of the research on wild primate crop foraging has so far focused on the conflicts with subsistence agriculture. Crop damage caused by primate foraging in large-scale commercial agriculture is also a major facet of human–wildlife co...
With human influences driving populations of apex predators into decline, more information is required on how factors affect species at national and global scales. However, camera-trap studies are seldom executed at a broad spatial scale. We demonstrate how uniting fine-scale studies and utilizing camera-trap data of non-target species is an effect...
In behavioral studies, observer effects can be substantial, even for habituated animals, but few studies account for potential observer-related phenomenon empirically. We used wild, habituated chacma baboons to explore two key assumptions of behavioral ecology (i) that observers become a “neutral” stimulus and (ii) that habituation is “equal” acros...
Frugivory and seed dispersal contribute to the maintenance and regeneration of plant communities through transportation of seeds and enhancing germination through seed processing mechanisms. The effects of mammalian frugivore seed processing mechanisms on seed germination are generally well studied and the potential benefits include disinhibition (...
Understanding the determinants of ranging patterns in species susceptible to habitat fragmentation is fundamental for assessing their long‐term adaptability to an increasingly human‐dominated landscape. The aim of this study was to determine and compare the influence of ground‐based food availability, remotely sensed plant productivity, and indigen...
Spatial cohesion in group-living animals is assumed as a risk-sensitive characteristic. Few studies have explicitly investigated this assumption or asked whether risk-related changes in spatial cohesion operate over short-term or long-term scales. We explored whether two groups of wild samango monkeys, Cercopithecus albogularis schwarzi, would adju...
Gut passage time of food has consequences for primate digestive strategies, which subsequently affect seed dispersal. Seed dispersal models are critical in understanding plant population and community dynamics through estimation of seed dispersal distances, combining movement data with gut passage times. Thus, developing methods to collect in situ...
Predation risk affects prey species' behavior, even in the absence of a direct threat, but human‐induced environmental change may disturb ecologically significant predator–prey interactions. Here, we propose various ways in which knowledge of antipredator tactics, behavioral risk effects, and primate–predator interactions could assist in identifyin...
Camera trapping has become an increasingly reliable and mainstream tool for surveying a diversity of wildlife species. Concurrent with this has been an increasing effort to involve the wider public in the research process, in an approach known as ‘citizen science’. To date, millions of people have contributed to research across a wide variety of di...
Recent analyses have shown that typically diurnal primates may periodically exhibit some levels of activity at night. Despite this, there have been few studies that have explored whether diurnal primates living in temperate environments will extend their activity budgets to the nocturnal phase as a response to seasonal constraints. Using dual‐axis...
Brown hyaenas Parahyaena brunnea are classified as ‘Near Threatened’. Although predominantly scavengers, they are frequently blamed for livestock depredations leading to persecution. Information on brown hyaena diets is important for understanding the degree of potential conflict with farming livelihoods and exploring diet variation across their ra...
Many species orient towards specific locations to reach important resources using different cognitive mechanisms. Some of these, such as path integration, are now well understood, but the cognitive orientation mechanisms that underlie movements in non-human primates remain the subject of debate. To investigate whether movements of chacma baboons ar...
Ixodid ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) are important disease vectors for large carnivores, but the composition of the tick communities that parasitize carnivores is poorly understood. We collected ticks from leopards (Panthera pardus) and brown hyenas (Hyaena brunnea) in the Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa, to determine which species feed on these car...
Camera trapping is widely used to monitor mammalian wildlife but creates large image datasets that must be classified. In response, there is a trend towards crowdsourcing image classification. For high-profile studies of charismatic faunas, many classifications can be obtained per image, enabling consensus assessments of the image contents. For mor...
Vigilance functions to detect threats. In primates, these threats emerge from both predators and conspecifics, but a host of other social, demographic, and ecological factors have been shown to influence primate vigilance patterns. The primate vigilance literature is thus characterized by considerable variation in findings, with inconsistent or con...
Data on the population dynamics and threats to large carnivores are vital to conservation efforts, but these are hampered by a paucity of studies. For some species, such as the leopard (Panthera pardus), there is such uncertainty in population trends that leopard trophy hunting has been banned in South Africa since 2016 while further data on leopar...
Data oor die bevolkingsdinamika en bedreigings vir groot karnivore is noodsaaklik vir bewaringspogings, maar dit word in die wiele gery deur 'n gebrek aan studies. Vir sommige spesies, soos die luiperd (Panthera pardus), is daar so min inligting oor bevolkingstendense beskikbaar, dat luiperdtrofeëjag sedert 2016 in Suid-Afrika verban is, terwyl ver...
Wild species use habitats that vary in risk across space and time. This risk can derive from natural predators and also from direct and indirect human pressures. A starving forager will often take risks that a less hungry forager would not. At a highly seasonal and human-modified site, we predicted that arboreal samango monkeys (Cercopithecus albog...
Understanding how threatened species adapt their behavior to landscapes shaped by humans is increasingly important to ensuring they persist in a changing world. Matrix habitats can be shared spaces where human and nonhuman primates coexist. We set out to determine how an endemic, threatened forest specialist, the frugivorous, arboreal samango monke...
Robin Dunbar is a leading figure in British primatology. Since his early work on the social and reproductive strategies of gelada baboons in the 1970s, his research has focused on the evolution of sociality in primates. He has made significant contributions to understanding the constraints on social group size, particularly through the development...
Human-wildlife conflict between carnivores and livestock and game owners is an issue of high conservation concern and has led to the global decline of many large carnivore species. Research has shown that carnivores are often blamed for higher levels of predation of livestock and game than actually occurs and this often leads to retaliatory killing...
Understanding resource selection and quantifying habitat connectivity are fundamental to conservation planning for both land-use and species management plans. However, datasets available to management authorities for resource selection and connectivity analyses are often highly limited and fragmentary. As a result, measuring connectivity is challen...
Large carnivores such as leopards (Panthera pardus) are becoming increasingly endangered, and the importance of land outside of protected areas to carnivore conservation is becoming clearer. Data on the population trends and threats to leopards is imperative to inform sustainable management of the species, but there is a dearth of long-term studies...
The need to address historical imbalances in land tenure is a common theme in African politics. Protecting biodiversity and maintaining the contribution of wildlife to the economy, to ecosystems and cultures is not always top priority when implementing land reform initiatives. We explore the impact of land reform on the status of medium and large m...
A fundamental step in the management and conservation of wild species is advancing our understanding of how animals perceive and use their habitat. Spatial variation in risk either from natural predation or human disturbance generates a “landscape of fear” that can be measured and assessed using experimental patch approaches such as giving-up densi...
The devolution of user rights of wildlife in southern Africa has led to a widespread land-use shift from livestock farming to game ranching. The economic advantages of game ranching over livestock farming are significant, but so too are the risks associated with breeding financially valuable game where free-ranging wildlife pose a credible threat....