Applications to Ecology
In the western boreal forest, petroleum exploration features are
increasing breeding success, and hence possibly (given lifetime success)
fitness of individuals spatially associating with them. In the apparent
competition “fulcrum” in which more deer boost wolf populations, which
in turn drive declines in woodland caribou
(DeCesare et al. 2010;
Latham et al. 2011;
Boutin et al. 2012), deer expansion
is a substantial conservation threat. Conservation will require
landscape management to mitigate the widespread resource subsidies
afforded to deer, including active site restoration, which has been
shown to be promising for mitigating white-tailed deer use of seismic
lines (Tattersall et al. 2019).
Dauntingly, this restoration is required for 10,000s of kilometres of
seismic lines (Dabros, Pyper & Castilla
2018), as well as the other anthropogenic features associated with
resource extraction (Fisher & Burton
2018; Fisher et al. 2020) lending
urgency to the need for rapid application of ecological research to
management decisions.
Biodiversity declines due to landscape change are a global problem
(Maxwell et al. 2016) as are
invasive species (Gurevitch & Padilla
2004; Clavero & García-Berthou 2005)
and anthropogenic range shifts (Lawleret al. 2009; Chen et al.2011). Understanding the ecological mechanisms facilitating and
sustaining invasions is a key pursuit for and ecology. Global
biodiversity networks can quantify variation in mammalian distribution
and density at large scales (Steenweget al. 2017) but abundance is not always a reliable metric for
inference of mechanisms (Van Horne 1983;
Schlaepfer, Runge & Sherman 2002;
Battin 2004). Breeding success is more
directly reflective of landscape change’s effect on mammalian fitness.
These data can be garnered through camera-trap networks and modelled
with data on landscape change to aid inference about the mechanisms of
change: an intersection of fundamental ecology principles and applied
ecology practice that can aid inferences and the decisions derived from
them.