Poor communication between academic researchers and wildlife managers limits conservation progress and innovation. As a result, input from overlapping fields, such as animal behaviour, is underused in conservation management despite its demonstrated utility as a conservation tool and countless papers advocating its use. Communication and collaboration across these two disciplines are unlikely to improve without clearly identified management needs and demonstrable impacts of behavioural-based conservation management. To facilitate this process, a team of wildlife managers and animal behaviour researchers conducted a research prioritisation exercise, identifying 50 key questions that have great potential to resolve critical conservation and management problems. The resulting agenda highlights the diversity and extent of advances that both fields could achieve through collaboration.

We investigated mtDNA sequence variation in five populations of the loggerhead shrike Lanius ludovicianus, representing four subspecies, including the San Clemente logger-head shrike L. l. mearnsi, a critically endangered California Channel Island endemic. Variability in 200 bp of control region and 200 bp of cytochrome b was extremely low, and defined four haplotypes. Strong structure was apparent among all three southern California subspecies, including L. l. mearnsi, with one haplotype predominating in each subspecies. Although potential levels of gene flow between L. l. mearnsi and neighbouring populations are low, mtDNA data support field observations that some shrikes visit the island during winter but do not stay to breed, and suggest that these birds come from the mainland. The similarity in haplotypes between populations from Saskatchewan, Canada and those in southern California suggests post-glacial northern range expansion of the species. Our results confirm the evolutionary distinctiveness of L. l. mearnsi and justify continuing efforts for its conservation.

Successful conservation plans are not solely achieved by acquiring optimally designed reserves. Ongoing monitoring and management of the biodiversity in those reserves is an equally important, but often neglected or poorly executed, part of the conservation process. In this paper we address one of the first and most important steps in designing a monitoring program – deciding what to monitor. We present a strategy for prioritizing species for monitoring and management in multispecies conservation plans. We use existing assessments of threatened status, and the degree and spatial and temporal extent of known threats to link the prioritization of species to the overarching goals and objectives of the conservation plan. We consider both broad and localized spatial scales to capture the regional conservation context and the practicalities of local management and monitoring constraints. Spatial scales that are commensurate with available data are selected. We demonstrate the utility of this strategy through application to a set of 85 plants and animals in an established multispecies conservation plan in San Diego County, California, USA. We use the prioritization to identify the most prominent risk factors and the habitats associated with the most threats to species. The protocol highlighted priorities that had not previously been identified and were not necessarily intuitive without systematic application of the criteria; many high‐priority species have received no monitoring attention to date, and lower‐priority species have. We recommend that in the absence of clear focal species, monitoring threats in highly impacted habitats may be a way to circumvent the need to monitor all the targeted species.

We report the presence of a 128 bp tandem repeat in the mitochondrial control region of the loggerhead shrike (Aves: Lanius ludovicianus). All individuals examined had either two or three copies of the repeat or were heteroplasmic for two and three copies. This is the first direct demonstration of a tandem repeat associated with heteroplasmy in the control region of a bird. A novel model for repeat duplication, which involves an inverted repeat located adjacent to the tandemly repeated sequence, is presented. Individuals with three repeats are absent from the endangered population of San Clemente loggerhead shrike in southern California, suggesting that the island endemic has a small effective population size and that there is insignificant gene flow from the adjacent mainland.

SUMMARYPolymorphic nuclear microsatellite loci were used to characterize genetic variation in contemporary and historic populations of the San Clemente Island loggerhead shrike (Lanius ludo icianus mearnsi), an endangered bird with a current population of about 30 individuals, that is endemic to one of the California Channel Islands. We also compared the population of the shrike with two contemporary populations of the still abundant subspecies, L. l. gambeli, which live 120 km away on the adjacent mainland. The current population of L. l. mearnsi has 60 % of the genetic variation of the mainland shrike populations and is strongly differentiated from them. Comparison of living birds with 19 birds collected in 1915 shows that most of the variation within the island population was lost before the recent 90 % decline in population size, and the 20 % decrease in variation this century is probably attributable to genetic drift. Mitochondrial DNA control region sequence data from 80-year-old specimens show that there may have been limited introgression to L. l. mearnsi, this century, from another island subspecies, L. l. anthon i, found in the northern Channel Islands. Today, gene flow between L. l. mearnsi and mainland L. l. gambeli is very low, even though a few mainland birds visit the island annually. The island subspecies population has evolved sufficient genetic independence to justify ongoing conservation efforts to counter demographic collapse and genetic erosion ; the course of genetic erosion can now be monitored noninvasively, as demonstrated by this study, based on DNA amplified from feathers.