Wildlife Conservation - Science topic

Perhaps calculate population size both ways -- estimates from monthly data, estimates from annual data. Then one can see the variation of the estimates, reflecting either sampling limitations, variations in the animals' behavior, or actual population variations.

No, the poor living around protected areas should not disproportionately bear the burden of wildlife conservation. In many cases, these communities have lived in close proximity to wildlife for generations and have developed traditional practices for coexisting with wildlife. However, conservation efforts can often result in restrictions on land use and access to natural resources, which can negatively impact the livelihoods and well-being of these communities.

It is important to ensure that conservation efforts are implemented in a way that takes into account the needs and rights of local communities, and that they benefit from conservation activities. This can be done through a variety of approaches, including:

By ensuring that conservation efforts are equitable and benefit local communities, it is possible to build support for conservation and reduce conflicts between wildlife and people. This will not only help protect wildlife and ecosystems, but also promote sustainable development and improve the well-being of local communities.

In-situ and ex-situ conservation is the best solution for the conservation and sustainable management of medicinal plants but community awareness is also important. In most cases, the medicinal plants are collected by untrained or unprofessional local shepherds, plant collectors, some local traders, and even schoolchildren. They do not know even the plant part used as medicine and active ingredients and collecting/harvesting the plant's irrational ways like if the medicinal part of the plant is leaves, instead of collecting some leaves they cut the whole plants; if the active ingredients or medicinal part of the plant is root then they uproot the plant before seed setting which is the major reason of poor regeneration and sustainability of the plant resource in a certain area. There is thus a need first to identify the people who are involved in plant collection the to provide them training on the proper time of harvesting and collection techniques sustained without degrading the basic resources. There should be a clear-cut government policy on medicinal plant collection and trade following sustainable harvest and management principles.

I strongly agree with Ht. Decemson. There is no "best" journal for these species/topics. - It depends on whatever you have and need. Do not only rely on the IF.

There are a lot of specific "wildlife" or "conservation" journals

Journal of Wildlife Management

European Journal of Wildlife Research

Human-Wildlife Interactions

Wildlife Research

Mammalian Biology

Journal of Wildlife Diseases

Conservation Biology

Biological Conservation

Wildlife Biology

Journal of Wildlife and Biodiversity

Wildlife Society Bulletin

Wildlife Monographs

...

Same in Birds!

Avian Biology

...

However, it is also possible to publish in journals like "Science of the Total Environment".

You can try to find relevant journals here:

There you can sort for topics!

Best

Oliver

Everything in the world is relative. In some areas, wildlife has almost disappeared due to overpopulation and the lack of necessary measures to protect the environment.

Others, such as in Russia, have preserved vast wild territories where no human foot has set foot due to the demographic crisis. Grandiose projects are being created for the development and settlement of Siberia, the Far East and the Far North.

I think that with the right scientific approach to environmental problems, nothing terrible will happen and wildlife will be sufficiently preserved. And why else are countless environmentalists and conservationists well funded?

When you do ethology studies you certainly need to use a similar approach, technique and tools. When working in the daytime you might use a sunshade - but then need to use the same shade also in other localities.

The same goes for night time work, if lights are used for lets say mating frogs or salamanders, the same numbers of lights should be used on subsequence sites. Else the estimate of the size of the population will be squeved, even worse they get attracted to the light and try to create new domains near the light with new territorial fights.

Extreme example: In the crowded conditions if front of the lights. Females getting jumped asking the male to bugger off (release call) other males getting stressed up by the crowded conditions and start to do the multitask call, while you hear a chorus of territorial, aggression, attack and dominance calls - which could end making a wrong assessment of the behaviour of a species which actually live a very orderly social life. But the researcher disturb this, and then send in a report of one unusually aggressive and competitive species.

I actually did get to see this situation just some weeks ago, and was extremely confused as newly arrived at the site - meaning I had not caused it myself.

The reason for the local civil war among these frogs was that the ice and snow had melted on the most attractive part of the small lake - so they had moved over and restarted the process of drawing new borders between their territories.

Where one alpha male insisted on trying to define his territory in the most attractive spot making attacks up to 5 meters in every direction - interestingly his attack call was, 'quack quack' - which might sound very stereotype for a frog.

But the attack call for this species is supposed to be 'honk honk' (but still two times), now I also will have to figure out if there's 'dialects' or there's varieties of this species that have different calls. Well that's what make it fun with a frog that no other have studied before. =)

Jose L. Alcantara i advice have a look at the link shared

Hi, you need to be careful about your sampling method as asking people to fill up your survey like this may introduce multiple confounding variables to your study!

No idea

There is a problem with this question. Conservation does not need to be binary and by having these terms in-situ and ex-situ can limit ones thinking. A fertile area of conservation is the area at the interface of these terms. Many free-living populations of animals are now managed using techniques that would typically be used to manage captive animals. Hence Kakapo are managed on islands that they have been put on and many species are given additional food or provided with safe nesting sites, such as nest-boxes.

Yeah! But they are quite expensive. I am looking for similar GSM/GPS devices with local network coverage.

Most of published recommendation I am reading are related to the ban of wild meat consumption. These proposals neglects the cultural aspects and the well-being outcomes associated to subsistence hunting, and do not take into account the importance of hunting on protein provision in disenfranchised communities for example. This could be understood as a colonialist recommendation with a high probability to be ineffective in tropical developing countries. We need to find some balance between wildlife consumption regulation and the rights of traditional people. We are in a tricky moment, where it is very easy to let the rope break on the weaker side. Conservation amd decision makers should include local leaders and indigenous people in this discussion to increase the legitimacy of any recommendation.

I think you can withdraw from acceptance, its your right because you have not signed any type of agreement. For withdraw of paper you have valid reason. You should send two reminders and third final reminder

as an information for no corresponding in future.

There is no substitute to taking children on field trips to wildlife conservation projects.

Here's an excellent article on why indigenous languages must feature more in science communication.

http://theconversation.com/indigenous-languages-must-feature-more-in-science-communication-88596

Sustainable ecotourism (wildlife tours) = Sustainable wildlife use

You need seasonal data about the species diversity in the study areas connected by the corridors. Residents tend to remain in the area studied throughout the year while the migrants will move in seasons. This process of thorough observation requires patience. All the best!

apply in wwf

If you want to get confused by wrong answers, then ask questions about taxonomy and/or nomenclature to people who are not taxonomists.

In case anyone would like to read about this encounter with manatees, here is the note:

We received lots of great feedback from reviewers and from others in the marine mammal field and are glad we could provide some insight to other divers.

Tucker et al (2016) wrote a very comprehensive review on the available metrics up to their publication along with all kinds of question that could be answered with what metrics. It is freely available here:

Another update on the concept of using phylogenetic information that I find quite useful to understand what kind of metrics you need:

Dear Max,

Please check these useful PDF attachments.

Good luck

The book mentioned above does not give an answer of your question.

Direct conflicts between endangered species present unique challenges to conservation. Solutions to conflicts between endangered species are difficult to apply as recent management plans are typically focused on individual species and recovery actions could directly oppose one another. Unfortunately, the multi-species recovery plans are still not well developed.

I would recommend reading:

" Removing Protected Populations to Save Endangered Species "

" A framework for monitoring multiple-species conservation plans "

doi:10.2193/0022-541X(2005)69[1333:AFFMMC]2.0.CO;2

" Strongly interacting species: conservation policy, management, and ethics "

doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2005)055[0168:SISCPM]2.0.CO;2

"Conservation and conflict between endangered desert fishes"

We do quite a bit on conservation education in Scotland: https://www.snh.scot/professional-advice/education

And on volunteering:

Hope these are of use.

Hi Jay  

There are many theoretical and practical applications for the behaviour change programs for wildlife conservation and species protection, yet we have to examined practical validity of those application specially in the developing context.   Barrett, C. B., & Arcese, P (1995) have done research about “sustainability of integrated conservation-development projects (ICDPs). On the conservation of large mammals in sub-Saharan Africa”. As they explained “Initiatives to link rural development and species conservation, known as integrated conservation-development projects (ICDPs), have been launched with considerable fanfare and funding around the world. Although ICDPs hold appeal as broader ecological efforts than the conservation and development strategies that preceded them, they also suffer conceptual flaws that may limit their appropriateness and potential sustainability, at least when applied to the protection of large African mammals”. I am sending that research paper for your need, herewith as an attachments

Regards

Dr. Kumara 

For specific wildlife species, summer temperature may be conducive/predictive.

See attached 

Please follow the PDF attachment.

The short answer is 'no'. A longer answer is as follows: Species naturally change their ranges over time, usually just by small amounts - invading areas contiguous with where they lived before - but sometimes by long-distance dispersal even across ocean gaps. Monkeys reached South America from Africa, presumably by rafting on trees washed out to sea, for example. Over 30 million years [please check that number!] they have radiated into many new species, adapted to their new environment, and their competitors (sloths, marsupials etc.) and predators. Clearly they are now native, and so will the descendants of grey squirrels in Europe be after 30 million years. So 'yes', at some point between 0 and 30 million years. Where you draw the line is pretty arbitrary. Is the dingo native in Australia after 4000 [again check!) year? No, but it is on its way: genetically and behaviorally distinct from the dogs that came with people, but still the same species.

I like logistic regression, which gives you probabilities of finding an organism given certain ecosystem attributes.  If sagebrush cover is 30% and soil type is x, then the probability of finding these arthopods would be y.  It's often used in epidemiology, but has been used in ecology too.

Alternatively, quantile regression is a good tool to see what is happening at the extremes of the ecosystem.

Supplemental feeding here in Scotland is certainly a hugely divisive issue. It is used not only to improve stock quality, but also as a measure to reduce grazing on key habitats such as native woodlands and blanket bog land. Many however see it as a tool to mantain herd populations well above what is considered to be the maximum ecological grazing capacity of the land. 

Here in Scotland the grazing guidance is that populations do not exceed the 50% of maximum threshold for grazing across a specified area. Unfortunately given the way hinds and stags heft across the landscape, seasonal weather conditions and competition from domestic animals such  as sheep and cattle, very often this threshold is overtaken by circumstance. 

Some aspects of ecosystem services by insects such as ants has been dealt with in my publication:

 RASTOGI, N. (2011) Provisioning services from ants: food and pharmaceuticals. Asian Myrmecology 3, 103–120

Corrugated iron mats are preferable over roofing when catching snakes, the latter being used predominately for lizards. The attached document highlights some useful information in regards to the best time to look for reptiles, although conditions are likely to vary to those in the UK. 

Thanks Dear Latifan, I ´ll check yours articles and I hope that be useful! 

Dear Pires, thank you so much too. 

Best regards. 

Thanks Wendy

Oups, my apologies for missing the s! I am sorry to hear that conservation efforts came to a halt. Sadly, it won't be the first ones doomed by lack of political will and law enforcement...

As for the communication of your results, pre-prints can be an option if you want to discuss your methods and findings in more details with the community.

Great question!  I have many good and bad stories about various devices on small animals, but have come to the conclusion that the traditional methods are not as fool-proof and too expensive compared to what is new and better.  And I have a (hopefully great) suggestion: use passive harmonic dipole.  These are the same things that avalanche jackets have in them and you would need to buy the whole package (including the transceiver), but the costs might be cheaper than traditional radio tracking depending on how many animals you want to track.  Check out the Herp Review article (Herpetological Review, 2011, 42(4), 522–525) by GOURRET  and others from Australia (attached) and/or just Google "animal tracking passive harmonic dipole" and see what you get.  These devices are smaller than a grain of rice and can be placed on your study animal in a variety of ways, although a thread belt might be best for your sallies.  This is so the diode will eventually just fall off and you can find it again - and re-use on another animal.  I have a few colleagues who are now swearing by these and can vouch for their effectiveness for small amphibians.  Plus, you won't need to surgically implant them - a huge bonus for you and the animals!  Please let me know if you have any questions and I can help you with contacts that might be able to give you the best vendors etc.  Also, sometimes you can buy old and used avalanche finders from ski resorts and use those for much much cheaper as well.  Hope this helps.

Independent of the scale that probably is in inches??. The upper one seems to be part of the dorsal vertebrae of a beaked whale. The lower one seems to be a vertebra of a mysticete, probably of the genus Balaenoptera.

Simon,

You asked a very understandable question - but unfortunately one to which there is no simple  answer - in fact there may not be any answer to it. The idea of "carrying capacity" is almost impossible to define as it has to be related to a set of desired goals. If your management goal is hands-off and aims to "let nature take its course" then there is no such thing as a human determined carrying capacity - populations should be allowed to rise and fall as they do. If you have very specific conservation goals to maintain certain species at certain densities or certain habitats in certain states then you will firstly need to define those goals (based on whatever subjective criteria the management authorities chose). From here you will probably either need a lot of site specific studies to understand processes so you can predict desired population levels (I guess of elephants in your case) or else adopt an adaptive management approach where you monitor the state of the environment (i.e. through some indicators) and the size of your elephant population and if a certain elephant population begins to have an undesired impact then you need to react using whatever management tools you have (if you have any in the case of elephants).

Hope this helps.

John

HI again.

In the last years, from 2004 to 2015, there were monitoring works on the bird communities of the airports of the Canary Islands, but for the moment I don't know any publication about this subject, only "grey literature" (e.g. unpublished reports for AENA, the official agency for airports in the whole Spain). 

Apart from this, it's interesting to say that in the spring 2015 there was a massive arrival of Red-footed Falcons (Falco vespertinus) here, on Tenerife, and from about 40 birds detected in the northern airport of the island (Los Rodeos) close to the half of them died due to aircraft collision, despite the efforts of the airport personnel to avoid the problem. Incredibly, the falcons used the airport because at the time there were many grasshoppers (Acrididae) and they perched in the floor to catch them, even when the aeroplanes were very close to them. Please, see this link about it:

http://avescanarias.blogspot.com.es/2015/10/cernicalo-patirrojo-red-footed-falcon.html 

Rafael -

Nice question.  This is not an area of expertise for me, but as a retired statistician, I am wary of the way statistics are kept and interpreted, and like to be certain that this is considered. The attachments which Arvind supplied were very interesting with regard to your project, but we cannot take numbers at 'face value' without knowing how they were collected and understanding what they mean.  The second of his two attachments, at a glance, noted "background rates" of extinction, which apparently help you interpret the other numbers, so that seems like something important to understand.  I would also like to emphasize the importance of studying bias and variance for these estimates, and their exact meaning and data collection methodologies.  If such metadata were not discussed, they should be.

    

What occurred to me when I read your question is that when you look at a percent, such as extinctions from one cause as a part of all extinctions, you do have to have a good estimate, not only for extinctions due to that cause (hunting here), the numerator in your fraction, but also a good estimate of all extinctions, the denominator in your fraction of interest. 

It is my understanding, or at least I've heard, that many species of plants, or maybe just bacteria or fungi, likely come into existence and later become extinct, without our ever even knowing about it.  But you may just be talking about animal species, which I would guess would be less likely to have such a problem on a large scale, though I would not know.  My point, however, is that if you mean you are looking at extinctions from one cause as opposed to all others for animals, or say, for animals in Cuba, you should say so.  It is important to define exactly what you are trying to count, and to discuss the factors which may impact the meaning and the accuracy and precision of your results. 

Best wishes with your project. 

Cheers - Jim

PS -  Among your obstacles is to know what species were present within your area of interest (scope) 500 years ago, and what actually did cause extinction.  There could be multiple factors to which extinction may be attributed. How will you count them?  Might you strive for an estimated percent where hunting was likely the major cause, and another estimated percent of cases where hunting was likely a contributing cause, for example? 

Coypus is an agressive animal. In order to handle I suggest to used a plastic bag  with a cotton with anesthesia.

Hi, I think you can do discriminant analysis using three groups of spécimen, FULLY, NAKED and MEDIUM. 

you can see also the document of BERENGERE 2003.

I can help you in the analysis if you need.

You have to collect the fresh dung samples for better result. Fresh samples (less than 24 hours freshness) has higher DNA quality than older samples. But you can consider collecting 2/3 days old samples too. You have to collect the dung's outer layer and store in 95% ethanol. 

Hi Liz,

It really depends on the species and life stages that you are interested in studying. 

Adult anurans are generally very conspicuous during their breeding season while they call and migrate to wetlands.

Adult caudates are generally easier to sample during their breeding season with drift fences around a wetland.

Larvae of both anurans and caudates are readily sampled by dip-netting in late spring and early summer (and some species in winter!). But again, the species you catch at any time will change depending on what has bred earlier in the season and what has already hatched, metamorphosed and left the pond before you sample.

Even species that stay in the water year-round (some anurans, many stream salamanders, paedomorphic salamanders, neotentic salamanders) have seasonal patterns in detectability.  Siren lacertina activity in my study population are most active from January through September but are hard to catch in Oct/Nov/Dec. Amphiuma means in the same wetland are rarely captured outside of the spring/summer months (March-September).

If I was looking for a generality, I would say that terrestrial species are easiest to sample during rainy periods (as Mauricio Ocampo said for Bolivia) in the tropics as well as the temperate regions.  However, if there are multiple wet times across the season (often in temperate regions) I would expect to find different species across the year.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,

Tom

I think that this completely depends on the photographer and the species.

In herpetological photography, many photographers move the subject into a place where it is more easily photographed. This not only disturbs the individual intentionally, but also causes unnecessary stress. More specialised photographers tend to aim for in-situ photographs, so possibly many of the issues are due to amateur photographers or tourists. There have been a lot of incidents over  the past few years of tourists striving for the "ultimate selfie" and hence injuring and (in some cases) killing the individual (such as the incident with the dolphin calf, shark, and python that were shared across social media).

The flash can also damage the eyes of noctural and marine animals. It is actually illegal in the UK to photograph a seahorse or interact with a seahorse due to the harm it can cause to the individual.

Briefly, my understanding of the c-hat parameter is that it is used to adjust for overdispersion, most commonly in count data. Because overdispersed data often violates the assumption of independence required in most modelling approaches, the variances can be biased low (i.e. precision is too high) if this lack of independence is not accounted for. C-hat functions as a “variance inflation factor” to adjust the precision of the parameter estimates and when used along with QAIC can be useful for model selection. This might be useful for occupancy modelling if you suspect spatial correlation of some kind.

I’d recommend checking out the 2002 book by Ken Burnham and David Anderson on Model selection and multi-model inference.

Cheers,

Paul

The protection of nature and landscape of today do not. It is the policy of the problem, the administrator and the administered. The need for action in symbiosis of all stakeholders allows the preservation of the environment and landscape. It must pass through mechanisms both at the political, legal and educational (environmental education). This topic requires multitudes and various literatures. See links.

www.projetsdepaysage.fr/dimension_environnementale_et_paysagere_et...

Related my field experience setting traps, the rodent communities in Southeast Asia are mainly dominated by big rodents (i.e.: genus Rattus, Bandicota), so probably bottles cannot act as trap for adult individuals.

I have not seen areas with discarded bottles, probably as they are collected to sell (glass and plastic), probably not happening this in the Northern hemisphere.

Probably this two factors can contribute in some way to this bias of information.

And L. Mike Conner comment can also be right.

Hi Burak,

you might find activities of ISRIC - World Soil Information of your interest. Especially their data can be useful for your research (global 1km soil grid, etc.)

Regards

Lukas

I agree with most of what have been said. As much as I find spatial analysis in R convenient, it is challenging and tricky as a newcomer to get started with R on spatial data. I think that you should know what (and how) you would want to do process your data manually, e.g. in any GIS software, and then you should start thinking about doing batch data processing in R. As such, you will be able to understand what R is doing (in the best case), why the output is not as expected, and you should anyway check the data prior and after the processing in a GIS (or similar such as ZoaTrack) tool.

Unfortunately, often enough I found bugs in the algorithms, even in established software like ArcGIS and R packages, that I prefer to check results very thoroughly based on a randomized sampling principle. Of course, the amount of data coming from GPS collars is often so vast, that you'll not be able to check all of it, however it's better to run tests with a selection of data and check the results instead of "blindly" trusting the processing software. Believe me, you'll sometimes be surprised by the flaws of certain established processes. 

As movement ecologists, we find it a pity that most of the data collected through (still quite expensive) GPS collared animals is still simply "analysed" by calculating home ranges and drawing some lines on a map. Movements of animals and the degree of quality and quantity of data collected bears so much more potential for research and ecological insight in animal behavior and ecosystem processes...

I hope that you'll enjoy your work with animal movement data. It's an amazing topic!

This is a same problem that most conservation, taxonomic, photographers are encountering in Facebook groups platforms. In Facebook groups or page, it is easier to regulate since there is an Admin/s per group or page therefore the entry of guests and members is known and identified by administrator. in the Case of RG, I agree with Jean that it is very difficult to regulate admission of the poachers. However, RG provides every account the data (Stats) who interacted, read, download, or request your paper. Perhaps, the regulation will depend on every authors who uploaded their paper. 

Without having gone through all of the suggested studies above: For some fish species in aquaculture evacuation speed has been examined since it is closely related to appetite. It is though slightly different for fish in culture since their feed is more "efficient" than wild prey. The evacuation rate is dependent on temperature and fish size (and type of fish) and In a report I have the author (Alanärä 2002, pelletologi - läran om fiskens foder) combined data from two earlier studies (Ruhonen 1994 (Gastrointestinal responses of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) to dry pellet and low-fat herring diets: consequences for growth, feed utilisation and nutrient load into the water. PhD-thesis) and Grove et al 1978 (Satiation amount, frequency of feeding and gastric emptying rate in Salmo gairdneri. J. Fish Biol.,5: 507-516.) and constructed an equation to calculate evacuation rate for Rainbow trout that has not been published in any reviewed paper unfortunately. The model is based on rather few data points but might give a hint on what you are after. If you are interested I can send you the report. Good luck!

Interesting question. Perhaps there were multitude factors influencing supply and demand. You refer to precise timing for "the global recession" but perhaps there were earlier economic changes in various countries where wild harvests increased. And/or the methods for detecting wild harvests might have been enhanced? Likely accuracy of estimates might not be comparable for the three categories Presumably a huge challenge to quantify trade (often illegal) of wild harvested skins and not necessarily easy for captive and ranching categories. Good luck with teasing out the details.

Dear Anna;

My experience is that the closer to spawning time, the more willing Atlantic salmon are to migrate. You may remember (Jonsson et al. 2007) showing how time of upstream migration to the spawning grounds was related to water flow in the river. The more water in summer and early autumn, the earlier the fish ascended the river. But (1) migration stopped at very high discharges and (2) large fish needed more water to ascend upstream than smaller ones (see also Jonsson et al. 1990). Furthermore, Tetzlaff et al. (2008) reported that number of Atlantic salmon entering the Girnok Burn, Scotland on a given day was related to patterns of discharge over the preceding part of the arrival period. In wetter years, fish entry to the stream usually starts relatively early and continues throughout the pre-spawning period. In contrast, dry years may result in fish entry being delayed. Thus, Atlantic salmon appears more motivated to migrate towards the spawning grounds late than early in the season. I have similar experience from upstream migration of anadromous brown trout (Jonsson & Jonsson 2002). Thus, my hypothesis is that fallbacks can be reduced by delaying the upstream migration of the fish. This assumes, however, that the the fish migrated downstream as smolts from the area of the river where you would like them to return. Also, I would expect that fallbacks would be more common at extremely low and extremely high river discharges than at intermediate flows. It would be interesting if you have material to test this hypothesis.

References

Jonsson, B., Jonsson, N. Hansen, L.P. (2007) Factors affecting river entry of adult Atlantic salmon in a small river. -  Journal of Fish Biology 71: 943-956.

Jonson, N. Jonsson, B. (2002) Migration of anadromous brown trout in a Norwegian river. - Freshwater Biology 47: 1391-1401.

 Jonsson, N,, Jonsosn, B. Hansen, L.P. (1990) Partial segregation in the timing of migration of Atlantic salmon of different ages. - Animal Behaviour 40: 313-321.

Tetzlaff, D., Gibbins, C., Bacon, P.J., Youngson, A.F., Soulsby, C. (2008) Influence of hydrological regimes on the pre-spawning entry of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) into an upland river. - River Research and Applications 24: 528-542.

Just a word of caution on terminology:

Reintroductions and Introductions are two very different issues: the former indicates the release of a taxon to an area where it was present in earlier - historical - times and later got extinct, whereas the latter indicates the release of an alien (allochthonous) taxon to a new area. The release of wolves to Yellowstone has been a reintroduction, but the release of South American coypus and North American grey squirrels to Europe or that of red foxes to Australia have been introductions. The former are positive operations - if properly conducted - and tend to restore pristine zoocoenoses, whereas the latter are quite negative operations as they tend to upset ecosystems.

In both cases you should expect consequences on the ecosystems, usually favourable in the first case, nearly always negative in the second case. The effects of weather and climate integrate with these consequences (or rather the other way round!).

I'm not sure if this is feasible but supplemental feeding (hay or other) of domestic ungulates is an option that is sometimes used in the US where there are wolves (similarly, water is sometimes provided to allow livestock to temporarily persist in an area where they otherwise could not in order to get them farther away from, for example, a denning wolf pack).  These can both very labor intensive and very costly but can help to solve immediate problems.   Long term solutions sometimes require changing land use patterns and that is very difficult if there is not social / community support. 

best source in Germany:

Jenrich, J., P-W. Löhr & F. Müller (2010): Kleinsäuger, Körper- und Schädelmerkmale, Ökologie. Verein für Naturkunde in Osthessen e. V. Fulda. 340 pages. ISBN 978-3-86568-147-8

(with excellent graphs ans photos)

Please follow the link might be useful:

You would be best to design your field sampling about your desired analysis/data. 

MacKenzie and Royle have some great foundational works. An older but reliable source will also be Studies in Avian Biology No. 6.

Dear Miguel,

How to get this grant for NGO? It was interesting.

Thanks

Hi Tia, there is a large body of work going back several decades, emanating from centres such as University of British Columbia, Vancouver (including mathematical models from Carl F Walters), and University of Washington, Seattle, also from Juneau, Alaska (SM Gende), and associated Fisheries research centers. Burnett et al (2007) comment on the need for habitat conservation, and Laetz et al. (2009, attached) on the implication of toxic chemicals in salmon declines. See also Prof Scott Hinch at UBC. I hope this will give you a start.  Best wishes, Julian

Simple dichotomous variables severely limit the types of analyses you can perform. Is there any way you could change the Yes/No responses to a Likert scale? This would be a more robust method.

Unfortunately, this sounds more like a political rather than a scientific question. Politicians oblivious to science (something we in the US are coming to know all too much about) can do a great deal of harm, and there are limits to what can be done if there's no local political backlash against the policy. Appeals from international conservation organizations may have some effect, but their pleas are likely to be ignored if there's a strong local constituency in favor of culling. 

Hi Harikrishnan,

I always recommend to use maximum likelihood estimation rather than simpler least square methods. The reason is that, as Dan has noted, least squares is only a form of maximum likelihood estimation with a very particular assumption about how the errors in your predictions (in our case, for instance, relative abundances)  are distributed. Most of the time this assumption is not made explicit. For instance, if you are fitting a rank-abundance plot through least squares, you are assuming that the error in your predicted abundances is normally and distributed with the same variance along all ranks, from the first ranked species to the last one... and this is too much to assume, in general!!! In addition, since  abundance data can be represented using different abundance plots (Preston like histograms, cummulative empirical distribution, probability densities, and rank-abundance plots), the afore-mentioned assumption is not independent from the type of representation you are using.

On the contrary, if you are using maximum likelihood, the assumptions of your model should be made fully explicit. According to maximum likelihood, all you have is the best probability of obtaining your abundance data under model assumptions, which is fully independent from the way you are representing your SAD. In addition, this allows you to reliably compare different models by using Akaike Information Criteria. And this is very good!

You can get some inspiration from our paper:

Ecology Letters, (2007) 11: xxx–xxx doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2007.01127.x

The implicit assumption of symmetry and the species abundance distribution by David Alonso, Annette Ostling and Rampal Etienne.

Warm regards,

David.

Dear Abhinaya,

As others have already mentioned, there are many livestock insurance schemes in action around the world already. Please see these links to papers show-casing carnivore-related examples from the field. Some are conceptional, others evaluate experiences made.

http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1659/0276-4741(2000)020%5B0226%3APTSLAE%5D2.0.CO%3B2 

http://www.livingwithlions.org/ScientificPapers/Evalution-of-compensation-scheme,Maclennan-et-al.pdf 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2003.00060.x/abstract 

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9985347&fileId=S003060531500068X 

Comprehensive reviews of the topic have been published by Philip Nyhus and Adrian Treves who have extensive experience with carnivore damage compensation schemes. For example, try access:

Nyhus, P.J., Fischer, H., Osofsky, S. and Madden, F. (2003) ‘Taking the bite out of wildlife damage: The challenges of wildlife compensation schemes.’ Conservation in Practice, 4(2) pp. 37-40.

Nyhus, P.J., Osofsky, S.A., Ferraro, P., Madden, F. and Fischer, H. (2005) ‘Bearing the costs of human-wildlife conflict: The challenges of compensation schemes.’ In Woodroffe, R., Thirgood, S. and Rabinowitz, A. (eds.) People and Wildlife: Conflict or Coexistence? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107-121.

Treves, A., Jurewicz, R.L., Naughton-Treves, L. and Wilcove, D.S. (2009) ‘The price of tolerance: wolf damage payments after recovery.’ Biodiversity and Conservation, 18(14) pp. 4003-4021.

Regards,

Florian

Great! Please keep me posted with your developments. I am interested to see what you find. 

One simple solution for common data files (e.g. copy + paste from xls or txt):

PAST package - see http://folk.uio.no/ohammer/past/

Input: Four Variables as columns and observations as rows (sorted according to your predefined groups which are designated per Edit:Row colour/Symbol).

Menu:Statistics:MANOVA function gives out a table of pairwise comparisons with Mahalanobis distances as one option.

Dear Bodas,

Here are some thoughts on the subject.

In 1969, the Delhi Zoo director says that "The tiger is about to disappear! ". Tiger hunting is prohibited in 1970, but in 1973 the Project Tiger was launched by Indira Gandhi in India's national parks are transformed into reserves, which it is forbidden to access the heart, to reserve center breeding tiger. Buffer zones, where the authorities to regulate the passage, are arranged. The program works in the 1980s, the Indian authorities announce that tiger populations have more than doubled. However, the project ran out of steam after Gandhi's death in 1984 the popular pressures to exploit forests on local politicians reduce buffer zones, pressures especially heard that power is decentralized to New Delhi as populations grow Always demanding more space. The results of Project Tiger also criticized: counting tigers was done by the fingerprint identification legs, no precise method, and administrators tend to inflate their results to justify the money paid by the state.

References:

Panda magazine, op. cit., p. 15

Michael Nichols et Geoffrey C. Ward, op. cit., p. 25

John Seidensticker, Peter Jackson et Sarah Christie, Riding the tiger: tiger conservation in human-dominated landscapes, Cambridge University Press,‎ 1999, 383 p.(ISBN 9780521648356

 In three years the tiger populations in the country have increased by 30%: it would be increased from 1,706 specimens 2010-2226 in 2014, according to a recent report.

Among the reasons for the improvement, the Minister has cited improved management of tiger reserves, intended to offer a habitat under protection and reduce contact between humans and animals, whose consequences are sometimes tragic. Today, 47 nature reserves, managed by the Project Tiger, covering some 50,000 square kilometers of Indian territory.

In this effort, are added those undertaken in the fight against poaching and smuggling of skins and body parts of tigers prized by the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Between China, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, there are nearly 6,500 specimens in captivity, and many are unfortunately high for their bodies and entertainment rather than conservation,

With my best regards

Prof. Bachir ACHOUR

Whoops, thought I'd answered.  Tom, I think the reference you should look at (beyond the Royle et al. 2014 book chapter dealing with area searches) is by Thompson et al. 2012 in JWM (something like a framework for SCR with unstructured sampling, involves scat-detecting dogs).  You also might look at Murray Efford's 'secr' vignettes for area searches or transect searches.  These will be the most trustworthy sources. 

In short, I think the grid cell must be smaller than a home range.  in a traditional area search (e.g., the Royle and Young 2008 paper), the (single) cell is being exhaustively systematically searched, so that the sampling allows for (imperfect) animal detection essentially anywhere.  In your situation, you are sampling along a one dimensional-transect or route, and animals can only be detected along that route.  For a number of reasons, transect-based samples or linear routes cause some difficulty related to the continuous space being sampled. One way of dealing with this is to treat the center of a grid cell as something like a static camera or hair-snag; if this is the route you follow, then you want grid cells smaller than a home range so that you actually generate spatial recaptures!  My memory is that the guidelines were something like 1-2 x sigma for cell dimensions, but check the references. 

I used nail varnish to paint the toe nails of small mammals. I got the best results when using fast drying ones with glitter inside.

But if you want to recognise the animals after more than 3 days I would prefer fur clipping!