Detecting abundance trends under uncertainty: the influence of budget, observation error and environmental change

ArticleCopyright © 2014 The Authors. Animal Conservation published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Zoological Society of London.Population monitoring must robustly detect trends over time in a cost-effective manner. However, several underlying ecological changes driving population trends may interact differently with observation uncertainty to produce abundance trends that are more or less detectable for a given budget and over a given time period. Errors in detecting these trends include failing to detect declines when they exist (type II), detecting them when they do not exist (type I), detecting trends in one direction when they are actually in another direction (type III) and incorrectly estimating the shape of the trend. Robust monitoring should be able to avoid each of these error types. Using monitoring of two contrasting ungulate species and multiple scenarios of population change (poaching, climate change and road development) in the Serengeti ecosystem as a case study, we used a ‘virtual ecologist’ approach to investigate monitoring effectiveness under uncertainty. We explored how the prevalence of different types of error varies depending on budgetary, observational and environmental conditions. Higher observation error and conducting surveys less frequently increased the likelihood of not detecting trends and misclassifying the shape of the trend. As monitoring period and frequency increased, observation uncertainty was more important in explaining effectiveness. Types I and III errors had low prevalence for both ungulate species. Greater investment in monitoring considerably decreased the likelihood of failing to detect significant trends (type II errors). Our results suggest that it is important to understand the effects of monitoring conditions on perceived trends before making inferences about underlying processes. The impacts of specific threats on population abundance and structure feed through into monitoring effectiveness; hence, monitoring programmes must be designed with the underlying processes to be detected in mind. Here we provide an integrated modelling framework that can produce advice on robust monitoring strategies under uncertainty.Portuguese Foundation for Science and TechnologyEuropean Commissio

Blue whales and seismic surveying in Australia

Blue whale populations were devastated in the last century by commercial whaling, which reduced blue whales from a quarter of a million to just a few hundred animals. Australian waters are home to both the Antarctic blue whale and a smaller sub- species, the pygmy blue whale. Blue whale numbers have increased a little since whaling ended but their recovery has been slow and numbers still remain in the few thousands. This analysis looks at the scale of seismic testing by the offshore oil and gas industry in important blue whale habitat in Australia. Blue whales in Australian waters Blue whales come to Australian waters to feed in just a few unique locations. There are three main areas: the Perth Canyon (March – May), the Bonney Upwelling off Victoria and South Australia (November – April) and the waters off Kangaroo Island extending into the eastern Great Australian Bight (November – May). Feeding is also thought to take place elsewhere off the WA coast from Cape Naturaliste northwards and also off Ningaloo Reef as pygmy blue whales migrate northwards (March – August) from Australia to Indonesian waters where they go to give birth to and nurse their young, before returning south (October – December) to feeding grounds in Australian waters. Blue whales are listed as endangered under Australian federal legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act)

Comparison of performance and fitness traits in German Angler, Swedish Red and Swedish Polled with Holstein dairy cattle breeds under organic production

Although the use of local breeds is recommended by organic regulations, breed comparisons performed under organic production conditions with similar production intensities are scarce. Therefore, we compared data of local and widely used Holstein dairy cattle breeds from 2011 to 2015 regarding production, fertility and health from German and Swedish organic farms with similar management intensities within country. In Germany, the energy-corrected total milk yield tended to be lower in the local breed Original Angler Cattle (AAZ, 5193 kg) compared to the modern German Holstein Friesian breed (HO, 5620 kg), but AAZ showed higher milk fat and protein contents (AAZ v. HO: 5.09% v. 4.18% and 3.61% v. 3.31%, respectively). In Sweden, the widely used modern Swedish Holstein (SH) breed had the highest milk yield (9209 kg, fat: 4.10%, protein: 3.31%), while the local Swedish Polled (SKB) showed highest milk yield, fat and protein contents (6169 kg, 4.47%, 3.50%, respectively), followed by the local breed Swedish Red (SRB, 8283 kg, 4.33%, 3.46%, respectively). With regard to fertility characteristics, the German breeds showed no differences, but AAZ tended to have less days open compared to HO (−17 days). In Sweden, breeds did not differ with regard to calving interval, but both local breeds showed a lower number of days open (−10.4 in SRB and −24.1 in SKB compared to SH), and SKB needed fewer inseminations until conception (−0.5 inseminations) compared to SH. Proportion of test day records with a somatic cell count content of ≥100 000 cells per ml milk did not reveal breed differences in any of the two countries. German breeds did not differ regarding the proportion of cows with veterinary treatments. In Sweden, SRB showed the lowest proportion of cows with general veterinary treatment as well as specific treatment due to udder problems (22.8 ± 6.42 and 8.05 ± 2.18, respectively), but the local breed SKB did not differ from SH in either of the two traits. In Sweden, we found no breed differences regarding veterinary treatments due to fertility problems or diagnosis of claw or leg problems during claw trimming. Our results indicate a stronger expression of the antagonism between production and functional traits with increasing production intensity. Future breed comparisons, therefore, need to consider different production intensities within organic farming in order to derive practical recommendations as to how to implement European organic regulations with regard to a suitable choice of breeds

Animal Consciousness

This chapter addresses the extent to which nonhuman animals are conscious. Most important perhaps is what criteria should be used in making such a determination

Animal lives

The writer discusses the possibility of writing an animal's biography. It may be too simple to assume that anthropocentrism—a belief in the centrality and superiority of human beings—is the reason why the concept of biography has always been applied uniquely to humans. To write a “life” may not just be to present a series of “facts” but to bear testimony to that individual's capacity to communicate through language the subject's own self-understanding. Using this rationale, the subject of biography is always potentially the subject of autobiography. The exclusion of animals from the Dictionary of National Biography does not just demonstrate the ongoing anthropocentrism of history as a discipline, but it also demonstrates the continuation of a version of human selfhood that is, and always has been, created out of, in exclusion from, and by the naming of animals

“Animal Spirits”

In “Animal Spirits” looks in some depth at several of Williams’s poems about dogs or cats written over the course of his career, from “Sub Terra” (1917); “Poem (As the cat)” (from the 1930s); the dogs of Paterson; and “To a Dog Injured in the Street,” which exemplifies the elegiac poetics and representational paradoxes of Williams’s late triadic style. Cats for Williams exemplify energy in precise control, its perfection in form—and that was his lifelong quest. Dogs, on the other paw, embodied for Williams the boundary-breaking force of uncorraled creativity breaking form. Both spirits, figured as animals, were totems central to Williams’s understanding of the human creative act, and these twin aspects of Williams’s method have proven profoundly inspirational to later writers. This article concludes with a brief consideration of the final poem Williams wrote, “Stormy,” a tribute to the Williams’s dog; in many ways it sums up the goal of his life’s work. The article ties that to A. R. Ammons’s poem “WCW,” also from the 1960s, which features an irrepressible dog as part of Ammons’s homage

Twentieth Annual Swine Day

These are the complete proceedings of the twentieth annual South Dakota Swine Field Day held on November 18, 1976 at South Dakota State University