Physiology, Behavior, and Conservation

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press ABSTRACTMany animal populations are in decline as a result of human activity. Conservation practitioners are attempting to prevent further declines and loss of biodiversity as well as to facilitate recovery of endangered species, and they often rely on interdisciplinary approaches to generate conservation solutions. Two recent interfaces in conservation science involve animal behavior (i.e., conservation behavior) and physiology (i.e., conservation physiology). To date, these interfaces have been considered separate entities, but from both pragmatic and biological perspectives, there is merit in better integrating behavior and physiology to address applied conservation problems and to inform resource management. Although there are some institutional, conceptual, methodological, and communication-oriented challenges to integrating behavior and physiology to inform conservation actions, most of these barriers can be overcome. Through outlining several successful examples that integrate these disciplines, we conclude that physiology and behavior can together generate meaningful data to support animal conservation and management actions. Tangentially, applied conservation and management problems can, in turn, also help advance and reinvigorate the fundamental disciplines of animal physiology and behavior by providing advanced natural experiments that challenge traditional frameworks.

Bears Show a Physiological but Limited Behavioral Response to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

“…Studies have examined the behavioral responses of wildlife to aircraft [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] (including UAVs [21]), but with the widespread increase in UAV flights, it is critical to understand whether UAVs act as stressors to wildlife and to quantify that impact. Biologger technology allows for the remote monitoring of stress responses in free-roaming individuals [22], and when linked to locational information, it can be used to determine events [19,23,24] or components of an animal's environment [25] that elicit a physiological response not apparent based on behavior alone. We assessed effects of UAV flights on movements and heart rate responses of free-roaming American black bears.…”

Predicting the effects of human developments on individual dolphins to understand potential long-term population consequences

“…Approaches that link short-term physiological and behavioural responses to disturbance to long-term population consequences could provide an overarching framework for investigating wildlife populations' viability in a changing environment [8,9,56]. We show how information on the behavioural ecology of a population can be integrated into an individual-based model that predicts an individual's behavioural dynamics and any potential change in its vital rates resulting from disturbance.…”

Understanding sensory mechanisms to develop effective conservation and management tools

“…Conservation behavior [1 ,3,4 ], conservation genetics [5] and more recently conservation physiology [6,7] have all been developed to provide wildlife managers with specific mechanistic tools, which allow for better planning and decision making and aim to improve the success of conservation and management programs. Investigations of sensory mechanisms and their application to wildlife conservation and management have been rapidly increasing in the past few years, and are becoming a vital tool in the conservationist's toolbox.…”