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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (5 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2023)

Understanding how animals use space and access key resources can offer critical insights that can inform management and conservation actions. This dissertation explores space use and movement behavior for three large mammalian species in South America at different scales and with different emphases. In Chapter 1, I study vicuña space use in the southern end of the species’ range and compare this with results from other parts of the vicuña range. My study offers the first estimates of vicuña home range sizes using telemetry data and compares these with results from previous studies. Additionally, I assess how vicuñas at my study site share space with conspecifics from other families, and if vicuñas display the strong territorial behavior displayed by the species in other parts of their range. Finally, I investigate how environmental factors may affect vicuña space use, including home range sizes, space-sharing and diel migration patterns. In Chapter 2, I study puma space use in three protected areas in the high Andean and Patagonian steppes and answer questions about the linkages between heterogeneity in the landscape and how pumas use space and move around in their home ranges. As a carnivore species known for its flexibility in adapting to very different habitat conditions, do pumas respond to differences in habitats and terrain factors with changes in behavior? What are the specific ways in which varying landscape variables affect this space use? Do different landscape factors affect behavior across study sites? Does changing landscape heterogeneity affect other factors such as distances moved by pumas? Chapter 3 comprises an assessment of connectivity between key jaguar habitats. First, I use a large, publicly available jaguar GPS telemetry dataset to develop a movement resistance layer, incorporating key environmental and anthropogenic variables known to facilitate or impede jaguar movement across the species’ range in the Americas. Next, I identify corridor areas connecting key jaguar habitats and other protected areas that are likely to be important from a jaguar conservation perspective across the jaguar range. These identified corridors may offer important strategic inputs towards range-level jaguar conservation strategies to ensure connectivity and dispersal between jaguar populations. Together, these analyses offer behavioral and ecological insights that can inform conservation and management actions for continued persistence of these species and their movement across landscapes.

    Cover page: From home ranges to range-level connectivity: conservation and behavioral insights from GPS telemetry data
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2021)
    Spillover impacts pose challenges for the management of protected areas (PAs). The issue of external threats encroaching on PAs has long been recognized, but a corollary—that PA conservation can increase costs borne by neighboring governments or landowners—is less well appreciated. In some contexts, basic principles of fairness and cooperation suggest that PA users should help pay these costs. Several countries have developed mechanisms for distributing the costs of spillover impacts to PA users, but not the United States. Here, we investigate whether and how US park visitors could help address one type of spillover, the need for wildlife conservation efforts beyond park boundaries, using a case study of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). We examine a “conservation fee” recently proposed in the Wyoming legislature, along with tax-based alternatives. After exploring some costs of wildlife conservation in GYE, we estimate that a fee of up to $10 per vehicle could generate up to $13 million annually, and tax-based approaches considerably more. We consider legal, political, and governance challenges, and ways to mitigate them. The GYE could serve as a demonstration site for visitor funding of cooperative, large-landscape conservation, for potential future expansion in the US and beyond.
      Cover page: Harnessing visitors' enthusiasm for national parks to fund cooperative large‐landscape conservation
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2023)
      The study of animal space use is fundamental to effective conservation and management of wildlife populations and habitats in a rapidly changing world, yet many species remain poorly described. Such is the case for the spatial ecology of the Vicuña-a medium-sized wild camelid that plays a critical role, both as a consumer and as prey, in the high Andean food web. We studied patterns of space use of 24 adult female vicuñas from April 2014 to February 2017 at the southern edge of its range. Vicuñas showed strong fidelity to their home range locations across the study period and shared large portions of their home ranges with vicuñas from other family groups. Vicuña home ranges in our study were considerably larger than previous estimates across the range of the species. Variation in environmental and terrain factors and the associated risk of predation affected vicuña diel migration distance but not home range size or overlap. Our study offers new ecological insights into vicuña space use that can inform conservation and management efforts of vicuñas and other social ungulates.
        Cover page: Spatial ecology of the Vicuña (<i>Lama vicugna</i>) in a high Andean protected area.
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2022)
        Large carnivores play critical roles in terrestrial ecosystems but have suffered dramatic range contractions over the past two centuries. Developing an accurate understanding of large carnivore diets is an important first step towards an improved understanding of their ecological roles and addressing the conservation challenges faced by these species.The puma is one of seven large felid species in the world and the only one native to the non-tropical regions of the New World. We conducted a meta-analysis of puma diets across the species' range in the Americas and assessed the impact of varying environmental conditions, niche roles, and human activity on puma diets. Pumas displayed remarkable dietary flexibility, consuming at least 232 different prey species, including one Critically Endangered and five Endangered species.Our meta-analysis found clear patterns in puma diets with changing habitat and environmental conditions. Pumas consumed more larger-bodied prey species with increasing distance from the equator, but consumption of medium-sized species showed the opposite trend.Puma diets varied with their realized niche; however, contrary to our expectations, puma consumption of large species did not change with their trophic position, and pumas consumed more small prey and birds as apex predators. Consumption of domestic species was negatively correlated with consumption of medium-sized wild species, a finding which underscores the importance of maintaining intact native prey assemblages.The tremendous dietary flexibility displayed by pumas represents both an opportunity and a challenge for understanding the puma's role in ecosystems and for the species' management and conservation. Future studies should explore the linkages between availability and selection of primary and other wild prey, and consequent impacts on predation of domestic species, in order to guide conservation actions and reduce conflict between pumas and people.
          Cover page: Dietary patterns of a versatile large carnivore, the puma (Puma concolor)
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2020)
          Carnivore predation on livestock is a complex management and policy challenge, yet it is also intrinsically an ecological interaction between predators and prey. Human-wildlife interactions occur in socioecological systems in which human and environmental processes are closely linked. However, underlying human-wildlife conflict and key to unpacking its complexity are concrete and identifiable ecological mechanisms that lead to predation events. To better understand how ecological theory accords with interactions between wild predators and domestic prey, we developed a framework to describe ecological drivers of predation on livestock. We based this framework on foundational ecological theory and current research on interactions between predators and domestic prey. We used this framework to examine ecological mechanisms (e.g., density-mediated effects, behaviorally mediated effects, and optimal foraging theory) through which specific management interventions operate, and we analyzed the ecological determinants of failure and success of management interventions in 3 case studies: snow leopards (Panthera uncia), wolves (Canis lupus), and cougars (Puma concolor). The varied, context-dependent successes and failures of the management interventions in these case studies demonstrated the utility of using an ecological framework to ground research and management of carnivore-livestock conflict. Mitigation of human-wildlife conflict appears to require an understanding of how fundamental ecological theories work within domestic predator-prey systems.
            Cover page: An ecological framework for contextualizing carnivore-livestock conflict.
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