Research Priorities from Animal Behaviour for Maximising Conservation Progress

Abstract

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.

Risk‐taking in free‐living spotted hyenas is associated with anthropogenic disturbance, predicts survivorship, and is consistent across experimental contexts

“…Our data suggest that, in addition to changes in space use patterns and circadian timing of activity in response to anthropogenic activity, the personality traits of hyenas may be changing as well. The fact that anthropogenic disturbance is associated with personality traits in large carnivores may also have useful implications for their conservation to better manage populations and human–wildlife conflict (Anthony & Blumstein, ; Greggor et al, ; Miranda et al, ).…”

“…This damage can result in significant repercussions for local carnivores via such retaliatory actions as mass poisonings; these actions, in turn, put carnivores at increased risk as human population density increases (Ripple et al, ). Therefore, gaining a better understanding of personality responses by larger carnivores to human disturbance could potentially contribute to conservation efforts (Greggor et al, ).…”

Habitat suitability modeling in different sperm whale social groups

“…Effective management decisions and appropriate conservation efforts depend on the population status of a species, which implies knowledge of its distribution and movements, habitat and feeding preferences, trends in abundance, behavior, and threats (Redfern et al , Sveegaard et al , Greggor et al ). Such information is often hard to obtain for cryptic and highly mobile marine species that span over large regions and are difficult to survey, particularly deep divers such as sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ) for which standard visual survey methods are not sufficient to detect and study the species.…”

The second warning to humanity—Why ethology matters?

“…To understand and mitigate their complex effects, behavioural research can be crucial. Functional landscape connectivity relies on animal movement behaviour, and the effects of habitat change (such as fragmentation or pollution) or human disturbance on wildlife can be estimated through behavioural responses (Greggor et al, ). Naturally, animal movement data are essential for managers to protect the appropriate habitats and corridors at the right time, and recent advances in tracking technology may also help to find novel solutions to human–wildlife conflicts: Real‐time tracking of African elephants in Kenya, for example, triggers an alarm when the animals approach a highway, allowing managers to react immediately (Wall et al, ).…”

“…For this reason, ethologists should be among those particularly concerned about nature's decline and especially motivated contribute to changing this. More importantly, as we will argue, ethology harbours ample potential to aid understanding of, and sometimes finding solutions to, real‐world conservation problems (e.g., Greggor et al, ). Caro and Sherman () have stated that global change is threatening our field of research as such.…”