The Effects of Habitat Fragmentation and Factors Influencing Nest Box Use on the Southern Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys volans) in Southern Illinois

I studied the effects of habitat :fragmentation on the southern flying squirrel (Glaucomys volans) in 30 forest fragments in southern Illinois. The fragments ranged in size from 6 ha to 5264 ha, and had varying degrees of isolation. I placed 10 nest boxes in each habitat fragment and checked them monthly. I captured southern flying squirrels in 24 of the 30 fragments, and found evidence of squirrels (i.e., nests and feeding stations) in 4 additional fragments. Thus, only 2 fragments did not show any evidence of squirrel use suggesting that the southern flying squirrel may not be particularly sensitive to the negative impacts of habitat fragmentation, in a primarily forested landscape like southern Illinois. However, the 2 fragments apparently lacking squirrels were small and isolated

A large-scale automated radio telemetry network for monitoring movements of terrestrial wildlife in Australia

Technologies for remotely observing animal movements have advanced rapidly in the past decade. In recent years, Australia has invested in an Integrated Marine Ocean Tracking (IMOS) system, a land ecosystem observatory (TERN), and an Australian Acoustic Observatory (A2O), but has not established movement tracking systems for individual terrestrial animals across land and along coastlines. Here, we make the case that the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, an open-source, rapidly expanding cooperative automated radio-tracking global network (Motus, https://motus.org) provides an unprecedented opportunity to build an affordable and proven infrastructure that will boost wildlife biology research and connect Australian researchers domestically and with international wildlife research. We briefly describe the system conceptually and technologically, then present the unique strengths of Motus, how Motus can complement and expand existing and emerging animal tracking systems, and how the Motus framework provides a much-needed central repository and impetus for archiving and sharing animal telemetry data. We propose ways to overcome the unique challenges posed by Australia’s ecological attributes and the size of its scientific community. Open source, inherently cooperative and flexible, Motus provides a unique opportunity to leverage individual research effort into a larger collaborative achievement, thereby expanding the scale and scope of individual projects, while maximising the outcomes of scant research and conservation funding

Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the ‘‘Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

Altimetry for the future: building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the “Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

A large-scale automated radio telemetry network for monitoring movements of terrestrial wildlife in Australia

Technologies for remotely observing animal movements have advanced rapidly in the past decade. In recent years, Australia has invested in an Integrated Marine Ocean Tracking (IMOS) system, a land ecosystem observatory (TERN), and an Australian Acoustic Observatory (A2O), but has not established movement tracking systems for individual terrestrial animals across land and along coastlines. Here, we make the case that the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, an open-source, rapidly expanding cooperative automated radio-tracking global network (Motus, https://motus.org) provides an unprecedented opportunity to build an affordable and proven infrastructure that will boost wildlife biology research and connect Australian researchers domestically and with international wildlife research. We briefly describe the system conceptually and technologically, then present the unique strengths of Motus, how Motus can complement and expand existing and emerging animal tracking systems, and how the Motus framework provides a much-needed central repository and impetus for archiving and sharing animal telemetry data. We propose ways to overcome the unique challenges posed by Australia’s ecological attributes and the size of its scientific community. Open source, inherently cooperative and flexible, Motus provides a unique opportunity to leverage individual research effort into a larger collaborative achievement, thereby expanding the scale and scope of individual projects, while maximising the outcomes of scant research and conservation funding

Disentangling diverse responses to climate change among global marine ecosystem models

Climate change is warming the ocean and impacting lower trophic level (LTL) organisms. Marine ecosystem models can provide estimates of how these changes will propagate to larger animals and impact societal services such as fisheries, but at present these estimates vary widely. A better understanding of what drives this inter-model variation will improve our ability to project fisheries and other ecosystem services into the future, while also helping to identify uncertainties in process understanding. Here, we explore the mechanisms that underlie the diversity of responses to changes in temperature and LTLs in eight global marine ecosystem models from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (FishMIP). Temperature and LTL impacts on total consumer biomass and ecosystem structure (defined as the relative change of small and large organism biomass) were isolated using a comparative experimental protocol. Total model biomass varied between −35% to +3% in response to warming, and -17% to +15% in response to LTL changes. There was little consensus about the spatial redistribution of biomass or changes in the balance between small and large organisms (ecosystem structure) in response to warming, an LTL impacts on total consumer biomass varied depending on the choice of LTL forcing terms. Overall, climate change impacts on consumer biomass and ecosystem structure are well approximated by the sum of temperature and LTL impacts, indicating an absence of nonlinear interaction between the models’ drivers. Our results highlight a lack of theoretical clarity about how to represent fundamental ecological mechanisms, most importantly how temperature impacts scale from individual to ecosystem level, and the need to better understand the two-way coupling between LTL organisms and consumers. We finish by identifying future research needs to strengthen global marine ecosystem modelling and improve projections of climate change impacts