Patterns in reef fish assemblages as determined by baited remote underwater video (BRUV) along the western side of False Bay: effects of site, depth and protection status

Includes bibliographical references.By protecting ecosystems from exploitation, no-take zones are considered the principal means by which marine species and their populations can be conserved for future generations. To be successful, no-take zones require continuous monitoring of the fish community to evaluate the response of marine ecosystems to anthropogenic impacts and environmental change. Obtaining an understanding of the patterns of species composition, abundance, and distribution, allows monitoring efforts to be focused, efficient, and properly interpreted. Baited remote underwater video (BRUV) was used to examine the effects of site, depth, andlevel of protection, on the diversity and relative abundance of temperate reef fish within the Table Mountain National Park (TMNP) Marine Protected Area (MPA). Four notake zones and adjacent exploited areas, subject to conventional management restrictions, were sampled monthly over a four-month period. A total of 36 species from three marine classes and 18 families was recorded. Species diversity (Shannon-Wiener index) was found to increase with sites closest to the mouth of the bay, whilst species abundance was found to increase with depth. Results indicated no consistent response to protection status among the sites at either the community or individual species level. However, the oldest no-take zone proclaimed for the purposes of reef conservation was found to harbour higher species diversity and a higher relative abundance of fish compared to its respective exploited area. Furthermore, the similar frequencies in which hottentot (Pachymetopon blochii) and roman (Chrysoblephus laticeps) were observed across the four study sites, suggests that these two commercially-important species are successfully recruiting inside and outside the no-take zones. These results indicate that physical factors, rather than protection status, within False Bay influence patterns of fish assemblage composition, abundance, and distribution. In future, and to improve comparability, assessments within the TMNP MPA should be designed to target similar locations and depth ranges within the bay. The success of no-take zones must be evaluated according to their individual design and management goals

Leopard Panthera pardus density and survival in an ecosystem with depressed abundance of prey and dominant competitors

The leopard Panthera pardus is in range-wide decline, and many populations are highly threatened. Prey depletion is a major cause of global carnivore declines, but the response of leopard survival and density to this threat is unclear: by reducing the density of a dominant competitor (the lion Panthera leo) prey depletion could create both costs and benefits for subordinate competitors. We used capture-recapture models fitted to data from a 7-year camera-trap study in Kafue National Park, Zambia, to obtain baseline estimates of leopard population density and sex-specific apparent survival rates. Kafue is affected by prey depletion, and densities of large herbivores preferred by lions have declined more than the densities of smaller herbivores preferred by leopards. Lion density is consequently low. Estimates of leopard density were comparable to ecosystems with more intensive protection and favourable prey densities. However, our study site is located in an area with good ecological conditions and high levels of protection relative to other portions of the ecosystem, so extrapolating our estimates across the Park or into adjacent Game Management Areas would not be valid. Our results show that leopard density and survival within north-central Kafue remain good despite prey depletion, perhaps because (1) prey depletion has had weaker effects on preferred leopard prey compared to larger prey preferred by lions, and (2) the density of dominant competitors is consequently low. Our results show that the effects of prey depletion can be more complex than uniform decline of all large carnivore species, and warrant further investigation

Relatório de estágio em farmácia comunitária

Relatório de estágio realizado no âmbito do Mestrado Integrado em Ciências Farmacêuticas, apresentado à Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Coimbr

Testing the effects of anthropogenic pressures on a diverse African herbivore community

Large herbivore communities around the world have declined steeply in recent decades. Although excessive bushmeat harvesting is thought to be the primary cause of herbivore declines in many ecosystems, the direct effects of anthropogenic pressures on large herbivore populations remain poorly described in most of the systems experiencing decline. To test the extent to which large herbivores are impacted by ecological and anthropogenic factors in a protected area (PA) thought to be experiencing human-caused decline, we fit distance sampling models to seven years of data from systematic ground-based surveys in Kafue National Park (KNP) to estimate the population densities and distributions of 10 species of large herbivores, and to test what factors affect these parameters. Population densities of the ten most abundant large herbivores in KNP were substantially lower than those reported for an ecologically similar PA with less poaching pressure. Low densities were consistent across species and areas, though there was ecologically important variation among species and size classes. Densities of larger-bodied herbivores were greatly depressed relative to smaller species. This pattern has direct and indirect effects on large carnivore populations, with broad implications for the ecotourism and trophy hunting industries. Statistically and methodologically rigorous methods to test the effects of anthropogenic and environmental variables on density and distribution exist, but are rarely applied to large herbivores. To quantify trends in herbivore populations and evaluate the effectiveness of conservation actions, our results show that distance sampling with stratified ground-based monitoring is an efficient and effective method. In the Greater Kafue Ecosystem (GKE), continued increases in resource protection are needed to facilitate the recovery of an economically and ecologically important large herbivore guild. More broadly, our results confirm that anthropogenic effects on large herbivore distribution and abundance can be strong over wide areas for all species (particularly the larger members of the guild), even in very large PAs

Data from: Changes in African large carnivore diets over the past half-century reveal the loss of large prey

1. Globally, large carnivores are declining due to direct persecution, habitat loss and prey depletion. The effects of prey depletion could be amplified by changes in the composition of the herbivore (prey) community that provoke changes in carnivore diets, but this possibility has received little attention. 2. Here, we tested for changes over the past half century in prey selection by the large carnivore guild in Zambia’s Kafue National Park. 3. Across 52 predator-prey dyads, 71% of the changes we observed were consistent with the hypothesis that large prey have become less important and small prey have become more important. Dietary niche breadth has decreased for KNP carnivores, and niche overlap has consequently increased. 4. We tested whether changes in the importance of prey species are related to their current abundance, and uniformly found that prey that have increased in importance are now relatively common, while those that have decreased in importance are now relatively rare. 5. We identify four potential effects of these changes for conservation (through potential effects on intra-guild competition, group size, the energetics of hunting and vulnerability to snaring) that warrant investigation. Synthesis and applications: Patterns of prey selection by the large carnivores in Kafue National Park have changed appreciably over the past half century. Decreased predation on large prey, which are now relatively rare, has caused niche compression and increased the overlap in carnivore diets. Predation by all of the large carnivores in the ecosystem now concentrates on four small prey species that remain relatively abundant (impala, puku, lechwe and warthog). Methods to detect the changes in predator-prey relationships we observed are well-established, but are rarely applied to large carnivore-ungulate systems. To guide conservation of ecosystem function, monitoring programs should be designed to consider whether prey depletion alters patterns of predation or competition within the predator guild, because these interactions have well-established effects on the distribution and abundance of both predators and prey. If the patterns seen in Kafue prove to be general, then where carnivores are limited by prey depletion, conservation efforts will be most effective if they focus particularly on mitigating the loss of large prey. In Kafue, targeted efforts to protect prey larger than 200 kilograms, particularly buffalo, should be a priority.13-Jun-201

Universal Dependencies 2.4

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008)

Universal Dependencies 2.5

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008)