Gyrfalcon Prey Abundance and Their Habitat Associations in a Changing Arctic.

Arctic habitats are changing rapidly and altering trophic webs and ecosystem functioning. Understanding how species' abundances and distributions differ among Arctic habitats is important in predicting future species shifts and trophic-web consequences. We aimed to determine the habitat-abundance relationships for three small herbivores on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska, USA by fitting data from 983 point counts (collected during 2019, 2021, and 2022) with N-mixture models that account for imperfect detection.

Antipredator behaviors in urban settings: Ecological experimentation powered by citizen science.

Animal behaviors are often modified in urban settings due to changes in species assemblages and interactions. The ability of prey to respond to a predator is a critical behavior, but urban populations may experience altered predation pressure, food supplementation, and other human-mediated disturbances that modify their responsiveness to predation risk and promote habituation.Citizen-science programs generally focus on the collection and analysis of observational data (e.

Eagles enter rotor-swept zones of wind turbines at rates that vary per turbine.

There is increasing pressure on wind energy facilities to manage or mitigate for wildlife collisions. However, little information exists regarding spatial and temporal variation in collision rates, meaning that mitigation is most often a blanket prescription. To address this knowledge gap, we evaluated variation among turbines and months in an aspect of collision risk-probability of entry by an eagle into a rotor-swept zone (hereafter, "probability of entry").

Prey abundance and urbanization influence the establishment of avian predators in a metropolitan landscape.

Urbanization causes the simplification of natural habitats, resulting in animal communities dominated by exotic species with few top predators. In recent years, however, many predators such as hawks, and in the US coyotes and cougars, have become increasingly common in urban environments. Hawks in the genus, especially, are recovering from widespread population declines and are increasingly common in urbanizing landscapes.

Wind patterns as a potential driver in the evolution and maintenance of a North American migratory suture zone.

Suture zones are areas where range contact zones and hybrid zones of multiple taxa are clustered. Migratory divides, contact zones between divergent populations that breed adjacent to one another but use different migratory routes, are a particular case of suture zones. Although multiple hypotheses for both the formation and maintenance of migratory divides have been suggested, quantitative tests are scarce.