The conservation physiology toolbox: Status and opportunities

For over a century, physiological tools and techniques have been allowing researchers to characterize how organisms respond to changes in their natural environment and how they interact with human activities or infrastructure. Over time, many of these techniques have become part of the conservation physiology toolbox, which is used to monitor, predict, conserve, and restore plant and animal populations under threat. Here, we provide a summary of the tools that currently comprise the conservation physiology toolbox. By assessing patterns in articles that have been published in 'Conservation Physiology' over the past 5 years that focus on introducing, refining and validating tools, we provide an overview of where researchers are placing emphasis in terms of taxa and physiological sub-disciplines. Although there is certainly diversity across the toolbox, metrics of stress physiology (particularly glucocorticoids) and studies focusing on mammals have garnered the greatest attention, with both comprising the majority of publications ( > 45%). We also summarize the types of validations that ar

Success stories and emerging themes in conservation physiology

The potential benefits of physiology for conservation are well established and include greater specificity of management techniques, determination of cause–effect relationships, increased sensitivity of health and disturbance monitoring and greater capacity for predicting future change. While descriptions of the specific avenues in which conservation and physiology can be integrated are readily available and important to the continuing expansion of the discipline of ‘conservation physiology’, to date there has been no assessment of how the field has specifically contributed to conservation success. However, the goal of conservation physiology is to foster conservation solutions and it is therefore important to assess whether physiological approaches contribute to downstream conservation outcomes and management decisions. Here, we present eight areas of conservation concern, ranging from chemical contamination to invasive species to ecotourism, where physiological approaches have led to beneficial changes in human behaviour, management or policy. We also discuss the shared characteristics of these successes, identifying emerging themes in the discipline. Specifically, we conclude that conservation physiology: (i) goes beyond documenting change to provide solutions; (ii) offers a diversity of physiological metrics beyond glucocorticoids (stress hormones); (iii) includes approaches that are transferable among species, locations and times; (iv) simultaneously allows for human use and benefits to wildlife; and (v) is characterized by successes that can be difficult to find in the primary literature. Overall, we submit that the field of conservation physiology has a strong foundation of achievements characterized by a diversity of conservation issues, taxa, physiological traits, ecosystem types and spatial scales. We hope that these concrete successes will encourage the continued evolution and use of physiological tools within conservation-based research and management plans

Scaling from individual physiological measures to population-level demographic change: Case studies and future directions for conservation management

Loss of biodiversity is a leading conservation issue and, accordingly, a central topic in ecological research is to predict how organisms respond to natural and anthropogenic environmental stressors. Proactive conservation science involves management strategies that rely on early identification and monitoring of threats before demographic instability is reached and may provide a more cost- and time-effective method for managing risks in an increasingly uncertain world. Using physiological measurements to predict organismal responses to environmental perturbations has historically been uncommon in the wild, despite the promise they hold as a tool to support management decisions. We provide an overview of interdisciplinary research that investigates environmental variation in conjunction with physiological processes to understand, and potentially predict, population-level demographic responses, which we refer to as Environment-Physiology-Demography, or EPD, studies. Using four EPD case studies (common murre, Cape mountain zebra, Daphnia magna, and common lizard) of the 29 we discovered during our literature review, we demonstrate how physiological biomarkers can be used as indicators of population change and/or stability to aid resource managers in the decision-making process. Of the 29 EPD studies we found, 72% were successful in connecting physiology to both an environmental and demographic change. Further, we outline geographic, taxonomic, and physiological biases observed across EPD studies, and the importance of considering the context-dependency of physiological traits when linking them to environmental variation and demographic processes. We encourage researchers to consider the EPD approach when investigating if and how the responses of individuals to environmental stressors translate into population-level consequences