Tom Bruce

Tom Bruce
University of Queensland | UQ · Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science

Doctor of Philosophy

About

26
Publications
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225
Citations

Publications

Publications (26)
Article
Full-text available
Camera traps are widely used in wildlife research and monitoring, so it is imperative to understand their strengths, limitations, and potential for increasing impact. We investigated a decade of use of wildlife cameras (2012–2022) with a case study on Australian terrestrial vertebrates using a multifaceted approach. We (i) synthesised information...
Article
Full-text available
Animals disperse seeds in various ways that affect seed deposition sites and seed survival, ultimately shaping plant species distribution, community composition, and ecosystem structure. Some animal species can disperse seeds through multiple pathways (e.g., defecation, regurgitation, epizoochory), each likely producing distinct seed dispersal outc...
Article
Full-text available
Information on tropical Asian vertebrates has traditionally been sparse, particularly when it comes to cryptic species inhabiting the dense forests of the region. Vertebrate populations are declining globally due to land‐use change and hunting, the latter frequently referred as “defaunation.” This is especially true in tropical Asia where there is...
Article
Full-text available
Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap‐derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber‐infrastructures, harmonizati...
Preprint
Full-text available
Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap-derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber-infrastructures, harmonizati...
Article
Pangolins are one of the most threatened mammal groups, as a result of habitat loss and exploitation for their meat, scales, and other body parts. However, there is a lack of quantitative data on pangolin populations; their behaviour and ecology make them challenging to survey. We undertook systematic camera-trap surveys of the 5260 km2 World Herit...
Article
Full-text available
Invasive mesopredators are responsible for the decline of many species of native mammals worldwide. Feral cats have been causally linked to multiple extinctions of Australian mammals since European colonization. While feral cats are found throughout Australia, most research has been undertaken in arid habitats, thus there is a limited understanding...
Preprint
Invasive mesopredators, particularly feral cats, are responsible for the decline of many species of native mammals worldwide. In Australia, there is currently limited understanding of the drivers of feral cat occupancy in tropical rainforests, the most biodiverse ecosystem in the continent. We carried out camera-trapping surveys at 108 sites across...
Article
Full-text available
Wildlife monitoring is essential for conservation science and data‐driven decision‐making. Tropical forests pose a particularly challenging environment for monitoring wildlife due to the dense vegetation, and diverse and cryptic species with relatively low abundances. The most commonly used monitoring methods in tropical forests are observations ma...
Article
Full-text available
Traditional transect survey methods for forest antelopes often underestimate density for common species and do not provide sufficient data for rarer species. The use of camera trapping as a survey tool for medium and large terrestrial mammals has become increasingly common, especially in forest habitats. Here, we applied the distance sampling metho...
Article
The sand cat is one of the world’s least studied small cats. Our camera-trap survey, one of the largest undertaken in a desert system, generated over 1500 images of the species across 100 camera-traps distributed systematically over the 2400 km ² core area of the Uruq Bani Ma’arid Protected Area of the Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia. The study reveale...
Article
Full-text available
Central African forest elephants (Loxodonta africana cyclotis) have declined by an estimated 62% between 2002 and 2011, largely as a result of poaching for the illegal ivory trade. They are now considerably more threatened than the Vulnerable African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana), and effective monitoring of refugia populations is essentia...
Article
Full-text available
Central African forest elephants (Loxodonta africana cyclotis) have declined by an estimated 62% between 2002 and 2011, largely as a result of poaching for the illegal ivory trade. They are now considerably more threatened than the Vulnerable African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana), and effective monitoring of refugia populations is essentia...
Article
Full-text available
Camera trap surveys can be useful in characterising terrestrial larger-bodied mammal communities in Central Africa forests. Two 40-trap, minimum of 100 days, survey grids conducted in the Dja Faunal Reserve of southern Cameroon showed differences in the mammal communities of two sites 32 km apart. Mammal richness, diversity, guild structure, body-s...
Article
Full-text available
Giant ground pangolins (Smutsia gigantea) are poorly known and difficult to study due to their nocturnal and burrowing habits. Here, we test the efficacy of using camera traps on potentially active burrows identified by local Ba'Aka guides to rapidly locate giant ground pangolins in the wild for subsequent observation and tagging for telemetry stud...
Article
Full-text available
Both leopard Panthera pardus pardus and African golden cat Caracal aurata occur throughout the Congo Basin and coastal forests of Central Africa. However, there remains a paucity of documented occurrences of these species within the region. Here, we document both species in the Dja Faunal Reserve DFR, Cameroon from images captured in a camera-trap...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The medium- to larger-bodied terrestrial fauna of the northwest portion of the Dja Biosphere Reserve (DBR) was surveyed using camera-traps. An array of 41 infrared-triggered trail cameras (Bushnell Trophy Cam Aggressor), each roughly 2 km apart in a square grid pattern, was placed for a combined c. 3,725 operational days for a wildlife survey in la...

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