Spatially explicit poisoning risk affects survival rates of an obligate scavenger

Obligate scavengers such as vultures provide critical ecosystem services and their populations have undergone severe declines in Asia and Africa. Intentional poisoning is a major threat to vultures in Africa, yet the impact on vulture populations of where poisoned carcasses are positioned is not known. We used re-sightings of 183 African white-backed vultures captured and tagged in two regions of South Africa, some 200 km apart, to estimate spatial differences in relative survival rates across life stages. Juvenile survival rates were similar in the two regions, whilst subadult and adult survival rates differed significantly. Using agent-based modelling, we show that this pattern of relative survival rates is consistent between regions that differ in intensity of poisoning, despite the proximity of the two regions. This may have important consequences for vulture conservation and the targeting of conservation efforts, particularly with regard to the efficacy of “vulture safe zones” around vulture breeding populations

The compensatory potential of increased immigration following intensive American mink population control is diluted by male-biased dispersal

Attempts to mitigate the impact of invasive species on native ecosystems increasingly target large land masses where control, rather than eradication, is the management objective. Depressing numbers of invasive species to a level where their impact on native biodiversity is tolerable requires overcoming the impact of compensatory immigration from non-controlled portions of the landscape. Because of the expected scale-dependency of dispersal, the overall size of invasive species management areas relative to the dispersal ability of the controlled species will determine the size of any effectively conserved core area unaffected by immigration from surrounding areas. However, when dispersal is male-biased, as in many mammalian invasive carnivores, males may be overrepresented amongst immigrants, reducing the potential growth rate of invasive species populations in re-invaded areas. Using data collected from a project that gradually imposed spatially comprehensive control on invasive American mink (Neovison vison) over a 10,000 km2 area of NE Scotland, we show that mink captures were reduced to almost zero in 3 years, whilst there was a threefold increase in the proportion of male immigrants. Dispersal was often long distance and linking adjacent river catchments, asymptoting at 38 and 31 km for males and females respectively. Breeding and dispersal were spatially heterogeneous, with 40 % of river sections accounting for most captures of juvenile (85 %), adult female (65 %) and immigrant (57 %) mink. Concentrating control effort on such areas, so as to turn them into “attractive dispersal sinks” could make a disproportionate contribution to the management of recurrent re-invasion of mainland invasive species management areas

La fuite, une alternative à l'amotivation en situation de liberté : une étude chez des adultes à l'université

no abstrac

Motivation, Rébellion, Fuite et injustice à l'école

no abstrac

La fuite, une alternative à l'amotivation en situation de liberté : une étude chez des adultes à l'université

no abstrac

Motivation, Rébellion, Fuite et injustice à l'école

no abstrac

Making neurophysiological data analysis reproducible. Why and how?

Reproducible data analysis is an approach aiming at complementing classical printed scientific articles with everything required to independently reproduce the results they present. “Everything ” covers here: the data, the computer codes and a precise description of how the code was applied to the data. A brief history of this approach is presented first, starting with what economists have been calling replication since the early eighties to end with what is now called reproducible research in computational data analysis oriented fields like statistics and signal processing. Since efficient tools are instrumental for a routine implementation of these approaches, a description of some of the available ones is presented next. A toy example demonstrates then the use of two open source software programs for reproducible data analysis: the “Sweave family ” and the org-mode of emacs. The former is bound to R while the latter can be used with R, Matlab, Python and many more “generalist ” data processing software. Both solutions can be used with Unix-like, Windows and Mac families of operating systems. It is argued that neuroscientists could communicate much more efficiently their results by adopting the reproducible research paradigm from their lab books all the way to their articles, thesis and books