Conservation physiology today and tomorrow

Cooke, Steven J.

doi:10.1093/conphys/cot033

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 28 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…ratio of young to old individuals, or males to females: Homan et al , Touma et al , Kern et al , Goymann , Rector et al , Hämäläinen et al ), weather conditions (Romero et al , Huber et al , Touma and Palme , Baker et al ), or time of day of sampling (Breuner et al , Tarlow et al , Touma and Palme , Heintz et al ). In addition, the interpretation of GC levels as informative indicators of disturbance requires validation of downstream fitness consequences at individual and population levels (Tarlow and Blumstein , Breuner et al , Bonier et al , Busch and Hayward , Cooke , Madliger and Love ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Do baseline glucocorticoids simultaneously represent fitness and environmental quality in a declining aerial insectivore?

Madliger

Love

2016

Oikos

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Glucocorticoids (GCs) are often interpreted as indicators of disturbance, habitat quality, and fi tness in wild populations. However, since most investigations have been unable to examine habitat variability, GC levels, and fi tness simultaneously, such interpretations remain largely unvalidated. We combined a quantifi cation of two habitat types, a manipulation of foraging ability (feather-clipping just prior to nestling rearing), multiple baseline plasma GC measures, and multi-year reproductive monitoring to experimentally examine the linkages between habitat quality, GCs, and fi tness in female tree swallows Tachycineta bicolor . Control females experiencing the higher early-season food resources of inland -pasture habitat laid larger clutches, but fl edged an equal number but lower mass off spring compared to those in riparian -cropland habitat. Despite these diff erences in reproductive success, females nesting in the two habitat types did not diff er in baseline GC levels at the early-or late-breeding stage. Feather-clipping reduced provisioning rate in both habitat types. However, baseline GC levels were aff ected in a habitat-specifi c way; only individuals in inland-pasture habitats showed an increase in GCs. Despite this diff erence in GC levels, the manipulation did not infl uence off spring mass, reproductive output, adult return rate (a proxy for survival) to the following year, or reproductive success in the subsequent year. Nonetheless, regardless of treatment, individuals with higher GC levels during the late breeding stage returned in the following year with higher GC levels at incubation, indicating a long-term eff ect on future GC levels. Our results indicate that environmental changes (e.g. foraging conditions) can have consequences for body condition, behaviour, and current and future baseline GC levels without concomitant infl uences on fi tness, and that diff erences in fi tness components between habitats may not be refl ected in baseline GC levels. Th ese results illustrate that baseline GCs may not simultaneously refl ect environmental quality and fi tness, potentially limiting their application in ecological and conservation settings.

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confidence: 99%

Do baseline glucocorticoids simultaneously represent fitness and environmental quality in a declining aerial insectivore?

Madliger

Love

2016

Oikos

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“…The burgeoning field of conservation physiology aims to apply physiological concepts, tools and knowledge to understanding and predicting how organisms, populations and ecosystems respond to environmental change ( sensu Cooke et al , 2013 ). The emergence of conservation physiology attests that researchers and stakeholders are aware that physiology is of relevance to conservation ( Cooke et al , 2013 , 2014 ; Coristine et al , 2014 ; Lennox and Cooke, 2014 ), yet despite this overtone, there is little evidence for physiological data being considered in conservation decision-making ( Cooke and O'Connor, 2010 ; Cooke, 2014 ). Accurate modelling tools are needed to supply managers and stakeholders with potential species distributions and community structure in response to changing environmental conditions and are major pieces of evidence in conservation planning ( Thuiller et al , 2013 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From a broader perspective, formalizing the need to incorporate physiological data into models used extensively in conservation will help to advance the burgeoning field of conservation physiology (Table 1 ). Ensuring that physiological data become and remain useful as a policy tool is the single biggest challenge facing the subdiscipline of conservation physiology ( Cooke and O'Connor, 2010 ; Cooke, 2014 ). Encouraging physiologists to gather data that are most relevant to current conservation practice, in this instance data that can inform species distribution models, will assist in alleviating this limitation.…”

Section: Predicting Impacts Of Climate Change On Biodiversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(2013), proximate causes were determined to be a mix of thermal limitations on activity time, shifting relationships between temperature and precipitation, physiological traits and species interactions. Multivariate approaches that can account for changes in physiological performance and the interaction of physiology with demography are likely to be required to model species distributions most accurately and infer extinction risks associated with climate change ( Fefferman and Romero, 2013 ; Cooke, 2014 ). Mechanistic models are poised to link the environment with demography and physiology by incorporating environmental effects on demographic variables such as climate-dependent dispersal, sex ratio and fecundity ( Adolph and Porter, 1996 ; Crozier and Dwyer, 2006 ; Buckley et al , 2010 ).…”

Section: Physiology Demography and Multivariate Species Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The abundance of a species at a particular location is a function of birth, death and migration rates, with persistence occurring at locations in space and time where birth and immigration exceed death and emigration. Physiological traits play an important demographic role by influencing survival and reproduction in a given set of environmental conditions ( Chown et al , 2010 ); nonetheless, demonstrating how physiology influences the balance between births, deaths and migration remains an important knowledge gap in the field of conservation physiology ( Cooke, 2014 ).…”

Section: Physiology Demography and Multivariate Species Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanistic species distribution modelling as a link between physiology and conservation

2015

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Conservation implications of a lack of relationship between baseline glucocorticoids and fitness in a wild passerine

Madliger

Love

2016

Ecological Applications

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The application of physiological measures to conservation monitoring has been gaining momentum and, while a suite of physiological traits are available to ascertain disturbance and condition in wildlife populations, glucocorticoids (i.e., GCs; cortisol and corticosterone) are the most heavily employed. The interpretation of GC levels as sensitive indicators of population change necessitates that GCs and metrics of population persistence are linked. However, the relationship between GCs and fitness may be highly context-dependent, changing direction, or significance, depending on the GC measure, fitness metric, life history stage, or other intrinsic and extrinsic contexts considered. We examined the relationship between baseline plasma corticosterone (CORT) levels measured at two periods of the breeding season and three metrics of fitness (offspring quality, reproductive output, and adult survival) in female Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor). Specifically, we investigated whether (1) a relationship between baseline CORT metrics and fitness exists in our population, (2) whether the inclusion of energetic contexts, such as food availability, reproductive investment, or body mass, could alter or improve the strength of the relationship between CORT and fitness, and (3) whether energetic contexts could better predict fitness compared to CORT metrics. Importantly, we investigated these relationships in both natural conditions and under an experimental manipulation of foraging profitability (feather clipping) to determine the influence of an environmental constraint on GC-fitness relationships. We found a lack of relationship between baseline CORT and both short- and long-term metrics of fitness in control and clipped birds. In contrast, loss in body mass over reproduction positively predicted reproductive output (number of chicks leaving the nest) in control birds; however, the relationship was characterized by a low R (5%), limiting the predictive capacity, and therefore the application potential, of such a measure in a conservation setting. Our results stress the importance of ground-truthing GC-fitness relationships and indicate that baseline GCs will likely not be easily employed as conservation biomarkers across some species and life history stages. Given the accumulating evidence of temporally dynamic, inconsistent, and context-dependent GC-fitness relationships, placing effort towards directly measuring fitness traits, rather than plasma GC levels, will likely be more worthwhile for many conservation endeavours.

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Conservation physiology today and tomorrow

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

Do baseline glucocorticoids simultaneously represent fitness and environmental quality in a declining aerial insectivore?

Do baseline glucocorticoids simultaneously represent fitness and environmental quality in a declining aerial insectivore?

Mechanistic species distribution modelling as a link between physiology and conservation

Conservation implications of a lack of relationship between baseline glucocorticoids and fitness in a wild passerine

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