Restrictions on roaming Until the past century or so, the movement of wild animals was relatively unrestricted, and their travels contributed substantially to ecological processes. As humans have increasingly altered natural habitats, natural animal movements have been restricted. Tucker et al. examined GPS locations for more than 50 species. In general, animal movements were shorter in areas with high human impact, likely owing to changed behaviors and physical limitations. Besides affecting the species themselves, such changes could have wider effects by limiting the movement of nutrients and altering ecological interactions. Science , this issue p. 466

Behavior is an important mechanism of evolution and it is paid for through energy expenditure. Nevertheless, field biologists can rarely observe animals for more than a fraction of their daily activities and attempts to quantify behavior for modeling ecological processes often exclude cryptic yet important behavioral events. Over the past few years, an explosion of research on remote monitoring of animal behavior using acceleration sensors has smashed the decades-old limits of observational studies. Animal-attached accelerometers measure the change in velocity of the body over time and can quantify fine-scale movements and body postures unlimited by visibility, observer bias, or the scale of space use. Pioneered more than a decade ago, application of accelerometers as a remote monitoring tool has recently surged thanks to the development of more accessible hardware and software. It has been applied to more than 120 species of animals to date. Accelerometer measurements are typically collected in three dimensions of movement at very high resolution (>10 Hz), and have so far been applied towards two main objectives. First, the patterns of accelerometer waveforms can be used to deduce specific behaviors through animal movement and body posture. Second, the variation in accelerometer waveform measurements has been shown to correlate with energy expenditure, opening up a suite of scientific questions in species notoriously difficult to observe in the wild. To date, studies of wild aquatic species outnumber wild terrestrial species and analyses of social behaviors are particularly few in number. Researchers of domestic and captive species also tend to report methodology more thoroughly than those studying species in the wild. There are substantial challenges to getting the most out of accelerometers, including validation, calibration, and the management and analysis of large quantities of data. In this review, we illustrate how accelerometers work, provide an overview of the ecological questions that have employed accelerometry, and highlight the emerging best practices for data acquisition and analysis. This tool offers a level of detail in behavioral studies of free-ranging wild animals that has previously been impossible to achieve and, across scientific disciplines, it improves understanding of the role of behavioral mechanisms in ecological and evolutionary processes. AbstractResumen: El comportamiento es un mecanismo importante de la evolución y que se paga a través del gasto de energía. Sin embargo, los biólogos de campo raramente observan los animales durante más de una fracción de sus actividades y los intentos de cuantificar el comportamiento para el modelado de los procesos ecológicos a menudo excluyen eventos crípticos pero importantes. En los últimos años se produjeron avances importantes en el monitoreo remoto del comportamiento de los animales, utilizando sensores de telemétro de aceleración (acelerómetros) que empujan los límites tradicionales de los estudios observacionales. Acelerómetros uni...

We review the ecological rationale behind the potential compatibility between top predators and biodiversity conservation, and examine their effectiveness as surrogate species. Evidence suggests that top predators promote species richness or are spatio-temporally associated with it for six causative or noncausative reasons: resource facilitation, trophic cascades, dependence on ecosystem productivity, sensitivity to dysfunctions, selection of heterogeneous sites and links to multiple ecosystem components. Therefore, predator-centered conservation may deliver certain biodiversity goals. To this aim, predators have been employed in conservation as keystone, umbrella, sentinel, flagship, and indicator species. However, quantitative tests of their surrogate-efficacy have been astonishingly few. Evidence suggests they may function as structuring agents and biodiversity indicators in some ecosystems but not others, and that they perform poorly as umbrella species; more consensus exists for their efficacy as sentinel and flagship species. Conservation biologists need to use apex predators more cautiously, as part of wider, context-dependent mixed strategies.

One hallmark of holistic face processing is an inability to selectively attend to 1 face part while ignoring information in another part. In 3 sequential matching experiments, the authors tested perceptual and decisional accounts of holistic processing by measuring congruency effects between cued and uncued composite face halves shown in spatially aligned or disjointed configurations. The authors found congruency effects when the top and bottom halves of the study face were spatially aligned, misaligned (Experiment 1), or adjacent to one another (Experiment 2). However, at test, congruency effects were reduced by misalignment and abolished for adjacent configurations. This suggests that manipulations at test are more influential than manipulations at study, consistent with a decisional account of holistic processing. When encoding demands for study and test faces were equated (Experiment 3), the authors observed effects of study configuration suggesting that, consistent with a perceptual explanation, encoding does influence the magnitude of holistic processing. Together, these results cannot be accounted for by current perceptual or decisional accounts of holistic processing and suggest the existence of an attention-dependent mechanism that can integrate spatially separated face parts.

Tracking animal movement using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is an increasingly popular method for studying animal ecology, behavior, and conservation. To date, most GPS location schedules have been set at regular intervals. If intervals are too long, they undersample the details of movement paths, and if too short, they oversample resting sites and deplete the unit's battery without providing new information. We address this problem by creating a dynamic GPS schedule that is linked to the activity level of the animal via an accelerometer onboard the tracking tag. We deployed traditional and accelerometer-informed GPS tags on northern tamanduas anteater (Tamandua mexicana) in tropical forest in the Republic of Panama (2009Panama ( -2010, and on fisher (Martes pennanti) in temperate forest in New York, USA (2009)(2010)(2011). These species are medium-sized forest-dwellers that frequently use tree cavities, ground burrows, and thick vegetation for resting and foraging, all traits that make them particularly challenging for GPS tracking. The accelerometer-informed tags performed better than the traditional GPS tags: they attempted 73.6% more locations per day, achieved 61.7% higher location success rates, spent 28.2% less time searching for satellites, made 67.4% fewer redundant location attempts in places where animals were inactive, and ultimately provided more data for a given battery size. The resulting tracks of animal movement had high temporal resolution, revealing aspects of their behavior and ecology that would have been missed by traditional tags, especially for the fast-moving fisher. By dynamically linking the location schedule to animal movement rate, accelerometer-informed GPS tags reduce the trade-off between collecting detailed movement data and recording movement data for a longer period of time. ß 2012 The Wildlife Society.