Ecological Dynamics Dept. | IZW Berlin

International Wildlife Congress 2025 | Wildlife Biology International Wildlife Congress 2025 | Wildlife Biology

Wildlife Biology will attend the International Wildlife congress in Lillehammer in September. We are proud to be the official outlet of this conference. Hope to see you there! vist.ly/3yqdr

🐻‍🗺️Patterns and drivers of range filling of alien mammals in Europe

vist.ly/3n8fg7a

#BiologicalInvasions #IntroductionPathways #Mammals #PotentialRange #PropagulePressure #RangeFilling #SocioeconomicVariables

Animal Behaviour - Bielefeld University With a team of over 50 people, the different research groups study animal behaviour within the framework of the four questions of Tinbergen, both in the lab and in the field. Current model systems include laboratory studies on zebra finches (

Bielefeld University seeks a postdoc for a 6-year scientific assistant position in Animal Behaviour, starting March 2026. Apply by Sept 10, 2025. More info: www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/biologie/forschung/arbeitsgruppen/behaviour #job

Defaunation: Loss of top predators disrupts food webs A national-scale camera-trap study from China reveals that losing top predators disproportionately reduces mammalian food-web complexity in protected areas. Their disappearance drives ecological simpl...

Defaunation: Loss of top predators disrupts food webs: Current Biology share.google/azILwFosh7hq...

#OnlyOneEarth #ActNow #Defaunation
"The loss of top predators disrupts food web complexities, triggering cascading effects across all levels of biodiversity. As a result, ecosystem services are reduced in defaunated landscapes." Published 📖 @currentbiology.bsky.social

"subtle stressors—Strong responses. Consistent negative effects of avian blood parasites on phenotypic and demographic traits across songbirds" 🐦

Tropical dry woodland loss in India since 1880 and its relation to current megafauna distributions Tropical dry woodlands provide ecosystem services to hundreds of millions of people and support high biodiversity. Despite their importance, many dry woodlands are under high and rising human pressur...

A Century of Loss: Long-Term #DryWoodland Decline and Its Implications for India’s #Megafauna

Our latest paper, along with @matthiasbaumann.bsky.social, @arashghoddousi.bsky.social, @tkuemmerle.bsky.social and others is now out!

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Subtle stressors—Strong responses. Consistent negative effects of avian blood parasites on phenotypic and demographic traits across songbirds Avian blood parasites are widespread and often considered benign, yet mounting evidence suggests they subtly impair host traits. This meta-analysis is timely and necessary to quantify their true impa....

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Host condition, phenology, reproduction, and survival were all negatively affected across studies - beyond acute infection, host specificy, or geographic regions such as Hawaii.

Importantly,our study revealed another research gap: Parasites are understudied in #animalbehaviour and #movementecology

After screening a total of 2400 publications, we found that these parasites consistently harm theirs hosts, despite often being overlooked simply because they are so common with many region yielding high prevalences.

Published 📖 🥳 In a new meta-analysis @mariusgrabow.bsky.social studied whether subtle infection, traditionally often considered as relatively benign, affect phenotypic and demographic traits. Using avian blood parasites, causing #avianmalaria as an example, we performed a systematic review 🧵

Post-doctoral fellow in functional genomics and ecophysiology Subject description The goal of the project is to uncover the mechanisms explaining why global warming and heatwaves reduce reproductive success and cause excess mortality in wild and domesticated war

I am looking for a postdoc wanting to use functional genomics to understand why birds 🐦 struggle with climate warming in @erc.europa.eu project #HotLife. Ideal candidate is a molecular evolutionarybiologist. Join us at @biologylu.bsky.social. Details 👇
shorturl.at/wijEq

Would appreciate a re-post!

Abstract submission is still open for two more weeks and we would love to receive more contributions for the Young-Researchers-Symposium on Magnetoreception & Navigation in Animals. Travel grants are also available.
www.sfb1372.de/young-resear...
@sfb1372.bsky.social

This new study "fills a much-needed gap and connects the body temperature response to infection with the framework of reproductive investment and trade-offs between current reproduction and self-maintenance."🐣

The WildCo Lab @wildco.bsky.social is recruiting 2 postdocs in quantitative ecology to work on mammal population estimation and monitoring from camera trap data. 🐺🐻🦌📷📈
Please share the word or apply to join us at UBC in lovely Vancouver, Canada!
wildlife.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2025/0...

We camera-trapped an "unprotected" forest in central Vietnam and found both rich biodiversity (including threatened & endemic species) but also alarming signs of defaunation. Urgent conservation needed! Glob. Ecol. Conserv:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ge...
#Annamites #Defaunation #CameraTrap #Conservation

a figure from the paper, with panels labelled "framework", "replication", "spatial extent", and "temporal extent". The third shows a strong partial bias towards Europe, the NE US, and SE Australia. The fourth shows a strong bias to post-2020 and terrestrial

Worldwide Soundscapes: A Synthesis of Passive Acoustic Monitoring Across Realms

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Movement phases make a difference in habitat selection: Iberian lynx diversity of responses to human‐modified landscapes By examining habitat selection across five movement phases in the reintroduced Iberian lynx, our study reveals high behavioural plasticity and key differences between and among resident and non-resid...

El lince ibérico, ¿por dónde se mueve y qué hábitats prefiere?

Respondemos diferenciando sus preferencias en las áreas de campeo, residencias transitorias, excursiones y dispersiones.

Analizando los datos proporcionados por 124 linces con collares GPS.

Recién publicado.

doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Metagenomic spaces: a framework to study the effect of microbiome variation on animal ecology and evolution Abstract. Microorganisms are essential for the normal functioning of most vertebrates. Hence, identifying and measuring the factors that shape host-associa

Microbes shape animal lives—but how do we measure their role in host evolution? We introduce a new framework to explore how microbial communities vary, evolve, and impact vertebrate hosts

Alberdi et al. @hologenomics.bsky.social @mgroussi.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Still time left to register with an abstract: New deadline July 2nd! Department 6 will be participating with some scientists and students: @ecodynizw.bsky.social See you in September at the #DZG2025 in Berlin🐾

Mucosal immune responses and intestinal microbiome associations in wild spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) - Communications Biology In wild spotted hyenas, the gut microbiome is shaped by mucosal immunity. Mucosal immune measures have strong associations with specific taxa of bacteria, hookworms and fungi known to establish mutual...

Whoops from within: a new study on the intestinal microbiome of wild spotted hyenas reveals complex associations with local mucosal immunity, paralleling human and rodent models.
#gutcrosstalks #amazinghyenas #OneHealth

Check out the article @commsbio.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Forecasting Dynamics of a Recolonizing Wolf Population Under Different Management Strategies We use a novel spatially explicit projection model to evaluate how different management strategies and system uncertainties affect the recolonization dynamics of wolves. We found that scenarios relat....

🐺🐺🐺 NEW PAPER! 🐺🐺🐺

Recovering wolves in WA tolerate threats except high harvest, high lethal removals, and lack of immigration

With @labgardner.bsky.social, Sarah Converse, & Ben Maletzke

zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Understanding how quickly diseases might spread in wildlife is important to control emerging diseases.

Graham Smith and his team predict wildlife distribution & abundance, but have also developed the citizen science app iMammalia & a web platform for people to upload images from camera traps.

Graphical abstract illustrating four recommendations for ecological modeling with aquatic animals. Be interdisciplinary and across levels: Includes icons for population biology (a bar chart of age structure) and behavioral ecology (a pie chart showing habitat use), plus a zoomed-in illustration of individual porpoises within a group. Use mechanistic modeling instead of statistics as a conceptual framework: A curved line plot shows respiration increasing with temperature, with data points color-coded by temperature and a shaded area indicating stressful conditions. Emphasize realism over precision: Shows a fish in a naturalistic habitat with plants and conspecifics, contrasted with a lone fish in a bare tank. Include stressful conditions: Reiterated through both the curved plot and a separate graph with three treatments, where respiration increases across treatments and with temperature, with the highest temperature range shaded in red.

Excited to share our new paper on how empirical research can better support mechanistic models—through realistic, interdisciplinary data and by embracing complex, individual-level mechanisms. Born from a @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social symposium!
doi.org/10.1111/2041...
@methodsinecoevol.bsky.social

The title of the paper: "A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance" - and an example data table

NEW! 🎉 We need wildlife disease surveillance to predict epidemics, but data sharing is rare - we found that only 2-3% of studies share raw data. So, we spent three years developing a data standard and R package to help get wildlife disease data into FAIR repositories. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance - Scientific Data Scientific Data - A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance

Do you study wildlife disease? Don't just share your sequences - share your testing data! We've developed a minimum data standard and an R package to help you, and wrote a little how-to-share-data handbook for disease ecology and One Health surveillance projects 🦇🦟🦠🗺️🔢

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Movement Ecology Annual Meeting 2025 - British Ecological Society Join the Movement SIG at the University of East Anglia for their yearly meeting, this year titled 'Understanding Migration'.

The next BES Movement Ecology SIG annual meeting is taking place on the 2nd-3rd of September 2025 in Norwich. Come and discuss your results or data with movecologists! www.britishecologicalsociety.org/content/move...
@britishecolsoc.bsky.social @ueaceec.bsky.social @ueaenv.bsky.social

📖Published📖

Chimento et al., develop a 3D Synchronized Outdoor Camera System (3D-SOCS): an inexpensive, mobile and automated method for collecting behavioural data on wild animals using synchronized video frames from Raspberry Pi controlled cameras 📸 🌍 🧪

buff.ly/4nr5m4y

Introducing {avilistr}: The AviList Global Bird Taxonomy is Now Available in R | Daly Analytics The Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced the release of AviList — the first unified global bird taxonomy. Today, I'm excited to share that this groundbreaking dataset is now available to R users thro...

🦆 My new R package {avilistr} is live on CRAN! 🎉

The first unified global bird taxonomy (11,131 species) is now accessible to #rstats users. I built it this weekend after Cornell Lab's AviList release last week!

🪿 Blog: www.dalyanalytics.com/blog/avilist...
💻 GitHub: github.com/dalyanalytic...

📖Published📖

Authors present the adm R package, developed to support the construction of abundance-based species distribution models , including data preparation, model fitting, prediction and model exploration 🌍 🧪 Read the article here 👇

buff.ly/sXjdv8o