Environmental factors shaping ungulate abundances in Poland

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Dampening prey cycle overrides the impact of climate change on predator population dynamics : a long-term demographic study on tawny owls

Funded by ERA-Net BiodivERsA NERC. Grant Numbers: NE/E010660/1, NE/F021402/1, NE/G002045/1Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Direct Nitrous Oxide Emissions From Tropical And Sub-Tropical Agricultural Systems : A Review and Modelling of Emission Factors

We acknowledge the financial support from the CGIAR Research Programs on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). Grant ref. n. P25.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Occurrence of Priming in the Degradation of Lignocellulose in Marine Sediments

Funding: E.G. was funded by the MASTS pooling initiative (The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland, grant reference HR09011). B.T. received funding from the Scottish Government's Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS) Division. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript Data Availability: All dataset files are available from the figshare database. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1554752. Correction 21 Apr 2016: The PLOS ONE Staff (2016) Correction: Occurrence of Priming in the Degradation of Lignocellulose in Marine Sediments. PLoS ONE 11(4): e0154365. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0154365 View correction at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0154365Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The development of an IgG avidity Western blot with potential to differentiate patients with active Lyme borreliosis from those with past infection

We would like to thank all the users of the National Lyme Borreliosis Testing Laboratory for their help and support and Rachel Milner, Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, UK for her invaluable technical expertise. We would also like to thank Martin Schriefer and Claudia Mollins at CDC for providing their serum samples. Part of this research was funded by the Chief Scientist Office for Scotland (CZG/2/561). Preliminary results from this study were presented at the 14th International Conference on Lyme borreliosis and other tick-borne diseases ICLB, September 27-30, 2015, Vienna, Austria.Peer reviewedPostprin

Ecological traps for large-scale invasive species control: predicting settling rules by recolonising American mink post-culling

1. Management programs worldwide seeking to reduce the density of invasive species must overcome compensatory processes, such as recolonisation by dispersers from non- or partially-controlled areas. However, the scale and drivers of dispersal in such context are poorly known. 2. We investigated the dispersal patterns of American mink reinvading 20,000 km2 of their non-native range following a culling programme led by citizen conservationists. Using multinomial models, we estimated the contributions of density dependence, proxies for patch quality and distance from the natal patch on mink settlement. 3. Seventy seven percent of mink dispersed and settled in non-natal patches. Dispersal distances were large with settlement probabilities only reduced by half at ~60 km, and 20% of mink dispersing > 80 km. 4. Females were more attracted to patches of high quality mostly found at low altitudes. Males favoured patches with intermediate current densities and consistently high quality. Synthesis and applications. Predicting post-culling recolonisation by a non-native mobile carnivore over large spatial scale could was using information on relative densities obtained during management interventions largely implemented by citizen conservationists. This was made possible by a monitoring component designed to feed into the adaptive management process implemented in this project. High mink mobility dictates management should take place on very large spatial scales to minimise reinvasion from un-controlled areas. Both males and females were attracted to patches that were previously consistently occupied, providing a degree of predictability to patterns of recolonisation. Targeting control to patches attractive to immigrant mink requires knowledge of current mink density. Creating so-called ecological traps in the face of ongoing immigration from peripheral areas provides a promising tool to effectively control mobile invasive species

Fine scale spatial variability in the influence of environmental cycles on the occurrence of dolphins at coastal sites

Passive acoustic data were collected under a series of grants and contracts from DECC Offshore Energy Strategic Environmental Assessment Programme, Marine Scotland, Moray Offshore Renewables Ltd., The Crown Estate, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Beatrice Offshore Wind Ltd. We thank Bill Ruck and colleagues from University of Aberdeen and Moray First Marine for fieldwork support. The tidal data was kindly provided by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. We would like to thank Dr Enrico Pirotta, Dr Julien Martin and Dr Barbara Cheney for their invaluable comments and ideas during the development of this work. We would also like to acknowledge the University of Aberdeen’s Maxwell computer cluster for assistance with the data processing. OFB was funded by “La Caixa” foundation and their support is gratefully acknowledged.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Using individual tracking data to validate the predictions of species distribution models

The authors would like to thank the College of Life Sciences of Aberdeen University and Marine Scotland Science which funded CP's PhD project. Skate tagging experiments were undertaken as part of Scottish Government project SP004. We thank Ian Burrett for help in catching the fish and the other fishermen and anglers who returned tags. We thank José Manuel Gonzalez-Irusta for extracting and making available the environmental layers used as environmental covariates in the environmental suitability modelling procedure. We also thank Jason Matthiopoulos for insightful suggestions on habitat utilization metrics as well as Stephen C.F. Palmer, and three anonymous reviewers for useful suggestions to improve the clarity and quality of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprintPostprintPostprintPostprintPostprin

A trait-based approach for predicting species responses to environmental change from sparse data : how well might terrestrial mammals track climate change?

Acknowledgements LS was supported by two STSMs by the COST Action ES1101 ”Harmonising Global Biodiversity Modelling“ (Harmbio), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). JMB and SMW were funded by CEH projects NEC05264 and NEC05100. JMJT and SCFP are grateful for the support of the Natural Environment Research Council UK (NE/J008001/1). LS, JAH and JMJT conceived the original idea. LS, JAH, JMB, TC & JMJT designed the study; LS collected the data; LS and TC performed the statistical analyses; LS conducted the integrodifference modelling assisted by JMB and SMW. LS conducted the individual-based modelling assisted by SCFP. LS led the writing supported by JMJT, JMB, SCFP, SMW, TC, JAH and GB.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A New Approach Using Modeling to Interpret Measured Changes in Soil Organic Carbon in Forests : The Case of a 200 Year Pine Chronosequence on a Podzolic Soil in Scotland

Discounted APC via the Frontiers Open Access Agreement Acknowledgments: Andy Kennedy for teaching about the podzolic soil sampling and horizon recognition. Rothiemurhus estate owners and the forest manager–Piers Voisey. Forest Research agency Soil Sustainability Research and Forest Mensuration, Modeling and Forecasting Science groups for consultations, practical and financial support. Ron Summers and Samantha Broadmeadow for help with GIS maps. Dr Robert Wilson for the help with finding ancient pine woodland locations in Scotland. We acknowledge the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (http://www.ecad.eu). This work contributes to the UKRI-funded Soils-R-GRREAT project (NE/P019455/1). We thank to two reviewers for their insightful comments. Funding: The research was funded by the University of Aberdeen and Forest Research joint PhD training grant. James Hutton Institute provided help in kind. The NERC (Natural Environmental Resources Council) grant NE/P019455/1 was used to pay publishing fees.Peer reviewedPublisher PD