Linking behaviour to dynamics of populations and communities: application of novel approaches in behavioural ecology to conservation

Abstract

The impact of environmental change on the reproduction and survival of wildlife is often behaviourally mediated, placing behavioural ecology in a central position to quantify population- and community-level consequences of anthropogenic threats to biodiversity. This theme issue demonstrates how recent conceptual and methodological advances in the discipline are applied to inform conservation. The issue highlights how the focus in behavioural ecology on understanding variation in behaviour between individuals, rather than just measuring the population mean, is critical to explaining demographic stochasticity and thereby reducing fuzziness of population models. The contributions also show the importance of knowing the mechanisms by which behaviour is achieved, i.e. the role of learning, reasoning and instincts, in order to understand how behaviours change in human-modified environments, where their function is less likely to be adaptive. More recent work has thus abandoned the ‘adaptationist’ paradigm of early behavioural ecology and increasingly measures evolutionary processes directly by quantifying selection gradients and phenotypic plasticity. To support quantitative predictions at the population and community levels, a rich arsenal of modelling techniques has developed, and interdisciplinary approaches show promising prospects for predicting the effectiveness of alternative management options, with the social sciences, movement ecology and epidemiology particularly pertinent. The theme issue furthermore explores the relevance of behaviour for global threat assessment, and practical advice is given as to how behavioural ecologists can augment their conservation impact by carefully selecting and promoting their study systems, and increasing their engagement with local communities, natural resource managers and policy-makers. Its aim to uncover the nuts and bolts of how natural systems work positions behavioural ecology squarely in the heart of conservation biology, where its perspective offers an all-important complement to more descriptive ‘big-picture’ approaches to priority setting. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Linking behaviour to dynamics of populations and communities: application of novel approaches in behavioural ecology to conservation’.

Alarm communication networks as a driver of community structure in African savannah herbivores

“…By documenting the role of social information use in driving interspecific social associations, this study underscores that understanding social behaviour, not only within but also between species, can be of key importance in population and community ecology (Goodale et al 2010;Farine et al 2015b;Bro-Jørgensen et al 2019b). Information transfer between species has been shown to provide significant benefits in a wide range of other taxa, ranging from predator detection in vertebrates (Hetrick & Sieving 2012) to resource localisation in both vertebrates (Farine et al 2015a) and invertebrates (Dawson & Chittka 2012), and the present findings bring attention to interspecific communication as a plausible driver of spatial organisation in these communities (Goodale et al 2010; see also Martinez et al 2018).…”

Emerging investigator series: use of behavioural endpoints in the regulation of chemicals

“…This provides a rm foundation for a bottom-up approach to understanding human impacts on the natural world". 124 In summary, there are three principal obstacles to improved use of behavioural endpoints in environmental risk assessments of chemicals. Below these obstacles are discussed together with possible ways forward (Fig.…”

Ethnoherpetology and snakebites in a risk area in Northeast Brazil

“…The Brazilian semi-arid region, especially the Caatinga, is a region with little rainfall and home to a great diversity of snakes [38,39,40]. It is worth mentioning that studies indicate that the increase in temperature favors the movement of snakes to anthropized areas in search of shelter and food [41], which may justify the cases which occurred inside or outside homes during the performance of domestic activities.…”