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Tip sheet for the October issues of Ecological Applications and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Ecological Applications

Behavioral responses of bison and elk in Yellowstone to snowmobiles and snow coaches

From 1992-2003, almost one million visitors entered Yellowstone National Park on snowmobiles or snow coaches. John Borkowski and colleagues (Montana State University) and the National Park Service studied the reaction of elk and bison to these disturbances. In the study, covering five winters, the researchers found elk responded three times as often as bison to groups of snowmobiles. As expected, smaller groups of animals reacted more than larger herds, and both elk and bison reacted more when humans tried to approach them. The scientists noticed the animals became somewhat habituated to snowmobiles and snow coaches. Borkowski and colleagues found no evidence that snowmobile use during the past 35 years affected the population dynamics of bison or elk. While they acknowledge scientific opinions will differ, they recommend maintaining snowmobile/snow coach traffic at or below the levels observed during the study.

Recovery from blast fishing on coral reefs: A tale of two scales

Studying the long-term effects of dynamite, or “blast” fishing, Henry Fox
(currently at World Wildlife Fund) and Roy Caldwell (University of California, Berkeley) describe the different effects of blast sizes on coral reefs. While immediate destruction from blast fishing is evident, the researchers compared the effects of a single blast on a reef to an area blasted on more than one occasion. After five years, the scientists found rubble from the single blast sites stabilized, with new coral and colonies slowly forming on the debris. When Fox and Caldwell examined extensively bombed areas, the rubble from the reefs formed “killing fields” of unstable rubble, inhospitable to new coral formation. According to the authors, while small scale rehabilitation is feasible for small blast areas, management to prevent blast fishing will be the more effective option for protecting coral reefs.

Frontiers

Wireless ecology

Looking at technology similar to what allows the average person to check their email from a laptop in a park or from home without messy cables, Scott Collins and colleagues from the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the NASA/Jet Propulsion lab discuss the use of wireless sensor networks for ecological research.

A quick snap to analysis

Looking for a new way to study bird habitat without disturbing the wildlife, Jason Luscier and colleagues from the University of Arkansas utilized digital cameras to better analyze the birds’ ecosystem. The researchers were studying grassland bird nesting ecology and wanted to quantify the percent of ground cover surrounding ground nests. However, they wanted to measure vegetation while nests were active and decided that taking digital pictures of nests would be a quick way to capture vegetational composition that they could measure later in the lab by analyzing images.

“We could just step up to a nest, snap a picture, and then step away. It was a simple and as quick as that. We did not want to fall into the trap of subjectively estimating percent cover, so we developed our technique using object-based image analysis,” said Luscier.

“The process allows for quick measurements in the field and thus allows for minimal disturbance to wildlife. Because it is relatively non-subjective and allows for users to estimate classification accuracy, we believe that our technique is more useful than traditional ones for estimating percent ground cover. It has great potential for estimating percent ground cover in most habitat types.”

Reviews from the issue include:

• “Lessons from agriculture may improve the management of invasive plants in wildland systems,” which recommends more caution in attempts to eradicate invasive species;
• A review of current non-native species data which reveals that most of the stored knowledge focuses on plant species, leaving large gaps in our knowledge of what and where other types of non-native insects and animals live in “Show me the numbers: what data currently exist for non-native species in the USA?”; and
• “Including behavioral data in demographic models improves estimates of population viability,” suggests researchers include animal behaviors when studying the survivability of populations.