Animal Conservation

Effective conservation depends on demographic metrics that reliably reflect species status, particularly population abundance. For elusive species occurring at low densities, however, such metrics remain difficult to obtain. Spatial capture-recapture (SCR) models are the standardized approach for estimating density in marked populations, but their data requirements, especially the need for multiple spatial recaptures across individuals, often limit applicability in small or data-poor populations. This constraint has resulted in knowledge gaps for some of the most vulnerable species, undermining evidence-based conservation planning and management. Using camera-trap data and SCR-derived density estimates from data-rich populations, we evaluated alternative, less data-demanding metrics and tested the hypothesis: Space to Event (STE), Mean Local Abundance (MLA), and Relative Abundance Index (RAI) exhibit predictable relationships with SCR-derived density; if supported, these metrics can reliably estimate density in populations where SCR models cannot be implemented. We applied this framework to the European wildcat (Felis silvestris), an elusive small felid with highly fragmented populations across Europe, for which density estimates are largely lacking despite growing conservation concern. Across 21 study areas spanning most of the species' range, our results indicate that European wildcats generally occur at lower densities than previously reported. SCR-derived estimates (n=10) averaged 10.32 {+/-} 11.56 inds/100km2, while STE enabled density estimation in five additional data-poor areas (mean 5.52 {+/-} 5.33 inds/100km2). STE showed a strong linear relationship with SCR-derived density (R2=0.98), supporting its use as a viable alternative when SCR is infeasible, although it tended to underestimate compared to SCR, especially at higher densities. In contrast, MLA and RAI showed weaker and non-linear relationships with SCR-derived density (R2=0.65), indicating substantially lower explanatory power and suggesting their estimates are more strongly influenced by confounding processes. By explicitly calibrating alternative metrics across a wide density gradient throughout most of the species' distribution, this study provides a transferable methodological framework for estimating density in low-density wildlife populations and the first continent-wide, standardized density assessment of a carnivore species. From a management perspective, our findings identify populations that may be most vulnerable, particularly those with the lowest densities, and highlight the need to prioritize absolute abundance monitoring.

O_LIWhen eradication is unfeasible, invasive predator control should evaluate how removal affects ecological responses by native species. Assessments often use total invasive predator abundance to evaluate prey responses, yet intraspecific variation in diet and space use means that some subgroups cause disproportionate impacts. Identifying these problem individuals, and the spatial scales over which their impacts operate, can enable targeted spatially explicit removal to maximise impact reduction. However, despite individual-level information is often already collected during trapping operations it is seldom included when analysing predator impacts, potentially biasing the conservation outcomes expected under blanket removal. C_LIO_LIWe use a novel framework and two decades of invasive predator control data to estimate how individual variation in residency status influences the distance-dependent impacts of invasive American mink Neogale vison on water vole Arvicola amphibius occupancy across two prey surveys. We also develop a sub-model to predict mink residency status for individuals with missing age data. C_LIO_LIThe probability of capturing adult mink decreased with elevation and years of control, indicating that long-term control altered the resident population and demographic composition of mink around water vole sites. C_LIO_LIDistance-dependent negative impacts of mink varied by residency status, becoming negligible at approximately 20 km from water vole sites for resident mink and 2 km for transient. The spatial scale of mink impacts was largest during the first vole survey when resident mink were more abundant, and declined rapidly for the second survey, when mink were less abundant and spatially clustered. Our results suggest that water voles have benefited mostly from reducing resident mink rather than the total population, especially in early control phases. C_LIO_LIManagers can use our framework to develop spatially explicit and impact-based strategies, not restricted to invasive species control, to construct empirically informed management buffers around populations of conservation concern. Long-term efforts will change the landscape and invasive predator contexts, and thus we recommend iteratively updating and re-evaluating management outcome evaluations. We argue that incorporating individual heterogeneity improves our understanding of ecological mechanisms influencing management success but that the suitability of targeted strategies should be evaluated for target socioecological contexts. C_LI

The biodiversity crisis is exacerbated by persistent gaps in taxonomic, geographic, and conservation knowledge. This study provides a comprehensive assessment of Linnean, Wallacean, and conservation shortfalls in Rivulidae (Cyprinodontiformes), one of the most diverse families of Neotropical freshwater fishes. To this end, an extensive dataset was compiled, comprising 494 valid species, 51 synonyms, 3,419 occurrence records, and information on life cycle, distribution, and conservation status. The Linnean shortfall remains open: after 1975, the rate of species description increased sharply, and estimates indicate that 103 species remain undescribed (95% CI: 53-212). The year of species description was influenced by detectability and accessibility factors, with larger species, more widely distributed species, and species occurring in more densely populated areas being described earlier. The Wallacean shortfall was broad and spatially uneven: only 5.34% of the region was considered adequately sampled. The conservation shortfall was also substantial: 179 species are threatened with extinction, 69 species remain Not Evaluated, and 62 are Data Deficient. The mean time between taxonomic description and first IUCN extinction-risk assessment was 25.7 years. Moreover, 59.9% of species have no records within protected areas, including 69.3% of threatened species. These findings synthesize an urgent challenge: biodiversity knowledge and conservation shortfalls must be overcome simultaneously to protect species that are still being discovered, remain poorly documented spatially, and are restricted to habitats under intense anthropogenic pressure. The conservation of Rivulidae cannot wait for complete knowledge; action amid uncertainty is necessary to prevent both known and unknown species from disappearing.

Connectivity is critical to sustaining endangered carnivores in speciose yet fragmented landscapes such as in the global south. Corridors to mitigate fragmentation are designed based on charismatic species or habitat-based approaches, but their multispecies effectiveness for maintaining functional connectivity remains poorly tested. We combined landscape genetic analyses across five sympatric carnivores - Panthera tigris, Panthera pardus, Prionailurus viverrinus, Felis chaus, and Melursus ursinus, to evaluate how landscape features shape functional connectivity in a globally important felid landscape. We then assessed the efficiency of existing tiger corridors and single-species surrogates for maintaining multispecies functional connectivity. Species exhibited contrasting responses to landscape variables, producing distinct resistance surfaces and connectivity corridors. Spatial similarity of connectivity between species pairs was highly variable (r = 0.14-0.93), but no single species effectively captured connectivity patterns of the broader carnivore community (maximum mean overlap of <0.7 across species). Moreover, genetically optimized corridors were at least 70% more efficient in capturing connectivity compared to existing tiger corridors, demonstrating mismatches between structural and functional connectivity. Our results highlight limitations of surrogate-based corridor planning and demonstrate that integrating multispecies functional connectivity can substantially improve conservation planning in human-dominated landscapes.

Aim: To forecast near-future arrivals of non-native terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates at the regional level. Location: Global (geopolitical regions worldwide, including countries and main administrative divisions). Methods: We compiled first regional record data and assembled functional and macroecological variables for 1,931 non-native vertebrate species. For each region, we identified recently arrived non-native species using retrospective windows of thirty and twenty years ending in 2015 (1986-2015; 1996-2015). We then fitted region-specific random-forest models classifying recently arrived species versus those not yet arrived using as predictors: (i) harmonised species traits (e.g., habitat, diet, body size and native-range attributes) and (ii) spread history, capturing time since first record elsewhere. Predictive performance was evaluated using leave-one-out cross-validation, comparing full models with trait-only and spread-only variants. We also assessed relationships between predictive accuracy, predictor importance, and the geographic positioning and trade connectedness of regions. Finally, we predicted region-specific probabilities of arrival for species not yet recorded. Results: Forecasting accuracy was consistently high across regions and taxa, with AUC values above 0.9 in more than half of the focal regions. Full models substantially outperformed models using either predictor set alone, and spread-history-only models typically exceeded trait-only models. Relative importance of spread-history predictors declined with geographic distance to the focal region, whereas predictability was lower in highly trade-connected regions. Predicted near-future high-risk arrivals were dominated by birds and freshwater fishes and showed strong regional structuring. A small set of species ranked highly across many regions (e.g., birds: Phasianus colchicus, Acridotheres tristis, Amandava amandava, Colinus virginianus, Corvus splendens and Lonchura malacca; fishes: Coregonus peled and Oreochromis mossambicus; mammal: Oryctolagus cuniculus), suggesting substantial unrealised spread potential. Main conclusions: Near-future regional arrivals of non-native vertebrates are predictable from spread history and species traits. This enables scalable, updateable regional watchlists to support prevention, early detection and horizon scanning.

Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain why some species persist or even flourish in urban areas. Yet, despite its central role in determining when and where animals encounter resources, disturbance, and risk, movement behaviour remains an overlooked mechanism of urban success. In urban areas, human activities are strongly periodic, i.e. predictable in space and time. This may favour species able to adjust their behaviour to predictable cycles of resources and risks in space and time. Here, we tested this hypothesis and tracked movement behaviour along an urbanisation gradient in three mammal species with different urban success: red fox (Vulpes vulpes), an urban dweller; raccoon (Procyon lotor), an invasive urban dweller; and wild boar (Sus scrofa), an urban utiliser. We analysed periodicity in movement behaviour and investigated whether increasing urbanisation is associated with periodic reorganisation of activity timing, space use, and further analysed alterations in habitat selection along the urbanisation gradient. Our results show that foxes aligned their movement behaviour with human activity, having stronger day-night contrasts and more repeatable space use than their rural counterparts. Urban raccoons showed a contrasting strategy; they were more active during the day, without changes in their movement routines under increasing urbanisation, suggesting a flexible strategy that explains their urban success. In contrast, wild boars reduced routine movement behaviours with increasing urbanisation, consistent with their occurrence in less predictable suburban environments and avoidance of city centres. In summary, our results suggest that movement behaviour may be a key mechanism enabling animals to persist in cities, revealing distinct behavioural strategies for coping with urban environments.

While emerging diseases pose a global threat to amphibians, the dynamics of understudied vector-borne blood pathogens remain poorly understood. Pathogen occurrence is driven by a combination of environmental, ecological, and phylogenetic factors, yet how these drivers shape blood pathogen communities in tropical amphibians is largely unknown. In this study, we used molecular screening and phylogenetic linear models (PGLMMs) to evaluate how climate and ecomorphology influence the incidence of three blood pathogen groups (Trypanosomatidae, Hepatozoon, and Rickettsia) in wild anurans from a protected area in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Among 93 individuals sampled, over 93% were infected with at least one pathogen. Trypanosomatidae was the most common (76.3%), followed by Rickettsia (69.9%) and Hepatozoon (16.1%). Pathogen responses to temperature were contrasting: Hepatozoon occurrence increased in warmer periods, while Trypanosomatidae declined. Furthermore, rheophilic species showed a lower probability of Rickettsia infection, providing the first evidence that microhabitat use influences blood pathogen dynamics in amphibians. Our findings demonstrate that hemoparasites prevalence is driven by a multifaceted interplay of variables, highlighting that conservation strategies must account for these pathogen-specific responses to habitat use and environmental change, even within protected areas.

Italy, one of Europe's most biodiverse countries, is expected to undergo landscape-wide nature recovery thanks to the EU Nature Restoration Regulation. National red lists represent critical instruments for informing conservation strategies at finer geographic resolutions and prioritizing taxa of national importance; yet the taxonomic completeness of Italian red lists remains unquantified in relation to national biodiversity. Equally, no systematic evaluation has been conducted on the representation of threatened and endemic Italian taxa within European and international conservation directives and treaties. We present the first comprehensive review of threat status and policy inclusion of Italian biodiversity, encompassing animals, plants, fungi, lichens, and algae. We cross-referenced national species checklists with Italian, European, Mediterranean, and global IUCN red lists, alongside policy annexes from the Birds and Habitats Directives, the Bern and Barcelona Conventions, and CITES. Our dataset comprised 76,845 taxa, of which 8,389 are endemic; yet red list assessments exist for only 10% of this total (7,349 taxa, including 1,700 endemics). Conservation policy coverage is even more restrictive: only 1,346 taxa are listed under at least one legislative instrument, with only half of these classified as threatened. This constitutes a compounding double bottleneck with most of the Italian biodiversity remaining both unassessed and unprotected and systematically biasing conservation policy toward an unrepresentative fraction of national biodiversity. We recommend accelerated national assessments and urgent establishment of a national biodiversity priority list founded on transparent prioritization protocols. This would complement ecosystem-based interventions mandated by the Nature Restoration Regulation while correcting for vertebrate-centred biases.

AimBiodiversity-rich regions often lack the scientific infrastructure needed to document and curate their own biodiversity, creating inequalities in access to taxonomic reference material. We investigated how biological, institutional, and geopolitical factors shape the retention, extraction, and appropriation of reptile holotypes, the name-bearing specimens upon which species descriptions are based. LocationGlobal. TaxonReptiles. MethodsWe compiled a historical dataset of reptile holotype origins and destinations spanning 1758-2024 to reconstruct long-term patterns of retention and international specimen flows. We then quantified species-level holotype retention, holotype flows between country pairs, and country-level patterns of retention, appropriation, and network centrality for the period 1990-2024, and used generalised linear mixed models to assess the biological, institutional, and geopolitical determinants of these contemporary circulation processes. ResultsAlthough nearly 90% of reptile species described originated in the Global South, less than a quarter of their holotypes remain housed there. Historically, exported holotypes consistently outnumbered retained holotypes on a decadal basis until the early twenty-first century. Retention was promoted by local scientific capacity, institutional infrastructure, collector involvement in species descriptions, and environmental governance. In contrast, extraction was concentrated in highly endemic regions with limited scientific infrastructure and was associated with taxonomic revisions, socioeconomic interest, and disparities in political stability and colonial history. Appropriation of foreign holotypes was greatest in countries with high research investment, strong environmental governance, and historical geopolitical influence. Main conclusionsGlobal patterns of holotype circulation reflect a persistent geography of scientific inequality. The distribution of taxonomic reference material emerges from the interaction of retention, extraction, and appropriation processes, linking local biodiversity discovery to uneven global scientific capacity. Reducing these inequalities will require investments in taxonomic expertise, institutional infrastructure, and governance frameworks that promote more equitable stewardship of biodiversity knowledge and its material foundations.

Native vegetation protection is a key strategy for delivering both biodiversity and climate benefits, and protected areas have been widely adopted to keep tropical biomes standing. Yet deforestation is driven by interrelated environmental and social factors, and the effectiveness of protected areas varies considerably across space. Here, we evaluated the impact of 802 protected and conserved areas in the Brazilian Amazon on preventing vegetation loss and avoiding carbon emissions over the past 40 years using statistical matching to address the location bias of protection. We found that protected areas were effective throughout the study period, reducing the probability of deforestation per km2 by an average of 0.5 percentage points per year. While the Amazon biome lost 14% of its native vegetation between 1986 and 2024, protected areas prevented the deforestation of 290,436 km2, nine times their actual internal loss. They also stored 45,336 Mt of carbon in 2016 (61% of the Amazon stock) and prevented the emission of 7,300 Mt of CO2 by 2024. Deforestation inside the areas and remoteness reduced their impact, while areas that were initially more preserved were more effective. Area size and age had no influence over impact once we analyzed the amount of avoided deforestation per size and age. Impact also varied across Brazilian states, highlighting the role of regional context. All three protection categories (conservation units, indigenous lands, and quilombola territories) showed a positive mean impact, indicating that each, in aggregate, contributes to reducing deforestation. These findings provide robust evidence of the substantial role of Amazonian protected areas in habitat conservation and climate mitigation, while underscoring that this contribution remains undervalued. We advocate for strategically expanding protection to areas of greatest potential impact, and for securing adequate funding to ensure protected areas can fulfill that potential.

Reproduction in species with parental care involves sustaining a brood of offspring through an energetically demanding period, when shifts in resource availability, weather, predation risk, and parental condition can strongly alter offspring survival. The most extreme outcome is complete brood failure (death of all offspring), which is relatively frequent in many bird species and may occur when conditions cross a viability threshold. Although complete brood failure is important for shaping fitness variation and population dynamics, we have limited understanding of how intra- and interspecific density dependence governs these events, or of how factors such as habitat quality and disease burden contribute to them, because deriving this requires fine-scale, individual-level data collected across generations for multiple overlapping species. Using a dataset totalling 38,509 nesting attempts from great tits (Parus major) and blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) in Wytham Woods, Oxford, UK, we examined how brood failure is shaped by local conspecific and heterospecific density, habitat structure, and avian malaria infection for a subset. Complete brood failure was frequent (14.75%), mostly involving chick mortality in the nest consistent with starvation, rather than brood removal by predators. Relationships between density and brood failure were strong but species-specific. Specifically, great tit failure risk was higher in neighbourhoods that remained densely populated across years, whereas blue tit failure risk was lower where annual great tit or combined density was high, but not where annual blue tit density itself was high. This suggests that local overall density reflects continuing constraint for great tits, while local annual density may partly track favourable within-year conditions and settlement patterns for blue tits. In great tits, failure was also more common where oak density was low and farther from the closest river (Thames), while habitat associations were weak in blue tits. Malaria infection was spatially heterogeneous and covaried with density and habitat, but infection status did not significantly explain complete brood failure. Together, these results show that complete brood failure is shaped by spatially structured local ecological context, and how density dependence in these events can differ in direction and timescale between sympatric species.

Fledging is a critical period of a seabird life cycle. Using satellite telemetry, we compared movements and survival proxies (transmission duration) of chinstrap penguin fledglings tracked in 2017 (n=8) and 2025 (n=17) relative to krill fishing vessel activity. In 2017, fishing vessels operated intensively near colonies during summer, resulting in early, frequent encounters (median 1.3 days post-fledging) and short transmission durations (median 9.2 days). In 2025, reduced fishing delayed encounters (median 10.0 days) and tripled tracking duration (median 24.0 days). Hidden Markov Models revealed that vessel encounters reduced the probability of transitioning from foraging to transit behavior ({beta} = -0.76), an effect stronger than the productivity ({beta} = -0.11). While 87.5% of 2017 fledglings ceased transmission prematurely within weeks (half of those right after entering areas intensively used by fishing vessels), 65% of 2025 fledglings survived beyond March, with half of those five transmitting until May after dispersing eastward to the South Orkney Islands. These findings suggest that spatiotemporal overlap with krill fisheries during the critical post-fledging window affected foraging behavior and was associated with shorter transmission durations. Our results support further research of post-fledging penguin ecology to better understand the potential impact of fishery, and, following the precautionary principle, support fishing seasonal protection of important areas during critical periods of krill predators life cycle.

Aims: Species' distributions are determined by the interplay between ecological niche and dispersal ability, constrained by biogeographical barriers. Bald-headed uakaris (Cacajao spp.) are highly specialized primates often associated with seasonally flooded forests. In this study, we used ecological niche models to assess changes in habitat suitability and geographic distribution of uakari species under future scenarios. Location: Western Amazonia. Methods: We integrated ecological niche models, current deforestation data, and dispersal ability to estimate habitat suitability under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios: intermediate (SSP2-4.5) and very high (SSP5-8.5) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Results: Our models project shifts in suitable conditions for all species. Three of the five species are projected to experience substantial reductions ([&ge;]62%) in suitable habitat conditions within their current ranges by 2050 under both future scenarios. Across the western Amazonia, up to 219,189 km2 and 211,276 km2 of land are projected to be unsuitable within the uakari ranges under the intermediate and very high emissions scenarios, respectively. This is particularly relevant for C. calvus, C. rubicundus, and C. ucayalii. At the species level, the uakaris may lose between 343 km2 and 84,531 km2 of their ranges in the intermediate scenario and 858 km2 and 76,216 km2 in the very high scenario. Shifts in suitability due to climate change are expected to vary from 6 to 191 km in the intermediate scenario and from 5 to 168 km in the very high scenario. Furthermore, the uakaris may lose between 0.5% and 8% of their current ranges due to deforestation in all scenarios. Main conclusions: Our findings reveal a high sensitivity of the uakaris to climate change impacts. It is projected that all species may experience contractions in the suitable areas and spatial suitability within their ranges by 2050, underscoring climate change as a relevant threat to these taxa.

Age-dependent survival is central to understanding population dynamics and life-history evolution. We analysed carcass weight and age-at-harvest data from 6022 red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) collected across Sweden between 1967 and 1971 to evaluate latitudinal effects on body mass and age-dependent survival. Carcass weights decreased from south to north in both adults and sub-adults, contrary to Bergmann's rule, with southern foxes weighing approximately 1.27 times more than northern foxes. The latitudinal weight gradient exceeded the sex difference in both age classes, and no sex x region interaction was detected. The decrease in weight with latitude is consistent with reduced prey availability and harsher winter conditions in the north, which limit growth and body size during development. Using a Bayesian age-at-harvest model with region-specific population growth rates (lambda), we estimated age-dependent survival probabilities for four latitudinal regions and both sexes. Despite the strong latitudinal gradient in weight, survival did not show a corresponding pattern - regional differences were uncertain, with all credible intervals spanning zero. Regional population growth rates were consistent with slight decline in the north and near-stability in the south-central region, which suggests that body condition and population dynamics are coupled at the regional scale despite no survival gradient. The decoupling of body condition and survival across regions suggests that mortality patterns are similar across the latitudinal gradient. We discuss these patterns in terms of latitudinal productivity gradients, prey availability, and life-history trade-offs in a widely distributed carnivore.

One challenge of reintroduction programs is ensuring that captive individuals are prepared for life in the wild, including having the ability to forage on wild resources. Foraging proficiency can be especially challenging to foster in species with a wide dietary breadth or reliance on ephemerally available resources. A relatively unexplored obstacle to release readiness may be an animals hesitancy to approach or consume unfamiliar foods, i.e. their neophobia and dietary conservatism. In this study, we examined the responses of a conservation breeding population of the extinct-in-the-wild alal[a] (Corvus hawaiiensis), a dietary generalist, to novel and familiar native and non-native fruits. Birds were similarly willing to contact both novel and familiar fruits, suggesting little aversion to the presence and appearance of novel food items. However, birds showed a clear preference for contacting non-native fruits over native fruits, regardless of familiarity. Additionally, while birds were willing to contact novel items, they were less likely to consume novel native fruits, suggesting that dietary conservatism may limit incorporation of these resources in the wild. Finally, juvenile birds were less likely to approach the testing setup and contact items, suggesting that neophobia may constrain their exploration of novel environments and resources. We discuss the implications of alal[a] preferences for non-native foods and reluctance to consume novel native items for pre-release preparations and the goal of wild species recovery.

Waterbirds serve as important indicators of both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem health, making effective monitoring essential for tracking population health and identifying potential causes of decline. Drones have provided opportunities to overcome historic waterbird monitoring challenges, but the expertise and time required for manual image analysis creates a major bottleneck. Recent advances in deep learning-based object detection have enabled rapid, automatic detection of features in complex ecological imagery, though applications have largely been limited to single-species colonies, and practitioners lack quantitative comparisons of annotation time and accuracy across different levels of automation. We systematically compared four waterbird monitoring approaches using identical survey areas from Chester Island, a mixed-species colony in Matagorda Bay, Texas, in 2025: (1) traditional ground-based counts, (2) manual drone imagery-based counts, (3) computer-assisted counts using pre-annotations from an object detector with manual human verification (Human+ML), and (4) fully automated counts using object detector annotations (ML-only). We trained a YOLOv10 object detection model on manually annotated imagery of Chester Island in 2021 and applied it to the 2025 imagery. Manual drone annotation detected 6,530 birds in 40.5 hr and served as the primary reference standard. Human+ML detected 5,826 birds (89% of manual) in 7.7 hr, an 81% reduction in annotation time. ML-only detected 5,679 birds (87% of manual) in approximately 46 min, a 98% reduction. Ground counts recorded 5,868 birds (90% of manual). Detection generalized well across species while classification depended heavily on training data and morphological distinctiveness. The Human+ML workflow emerged as a practical middle ground, providing practitioners with empirical data to evaluate partial versus full automation strategies based on monitoring objectives.

Context. The relationship between biodiversity and zoonotic disease risk is a central topic in community ecology, yet empirical evidence in Europe remains scarce and often contradictory compared to North American studies. Addressing this gap is fundamental to better anticipate zoonotic disease dynamics. Objectives. We investigated the transmission dynamics of West Nile virus (WNV) in Veneto (Italy), a major European hotspot. Because this vector-borne pathogen is primarily transmitted by Culex mosquitoes and maintained by several avian hosts, we analysed how multiple facets of both avian and mosquito biodiversity influence its transmission. Methods. Using Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) trained on longitudinal entomological and ornithological surveillance data, we modelled the probability of WNV presence in mosquito pools as a function of host and vector community structure. To isolate the effects of biodiversity, we explicitly controlled for climatic and landscape covariates. Results. In agricultural landscapes, we found that higher avian diversity leads to higher viral presence, driven by the dominance of highly competent synanthropic hosts. Conversely, a dilution effect emerges across the broader regional landscape where areas of higher ecological integrity allow for more complex and functionally diverse avian communities. Furthermore, we identified significant vector-mediated regulation, where high abundances of mammophilic vectors effectively suppress viral prevalence through larval competition. Conclusions. Our findings suggest that the dilution effect is a property of intact ecosystems which can be lost, or even locally reversed, in anthropogenically altered environments. Because such habitat degradation fundamentally alters zoonotic transmission dynamics, landscape planning must prioritize ecological restoration. Ultimately, embedding these practices into One Health strategies represents a proactive approach to mitigating disease emergence.

Camera trap networks such as Snapshot Safari have generated millions of labelled wildlife images across Africa, enabling the training of deep learning models for automated species classification. However, deploying models trained in one African region to another remains poorly understood. To the best of our knowledge, this study presents the first systematic evaluation of geographic domain shift within the African continent for wildlife camera trap species classification, using the Machine Learning sub-field of Artificial Intelligence. We use three model architectures, each interacting with Snapshot Serengeti in a different way: BEiTV2is fine-tuned on Serengeti images as a supervised baseline; DINOv2 with FAISS uses Serengeti images as a retrieval index without any weight updates; and BioCLIP is a true zero-shot foundation model that receives no Serengeti training data at all. All three are then evaluated on two Southern African test sets, Snapshot Kgalagadi and Snapshot Kruger, as well as on locally collected wildlife photographs from Botswana. We conduct eight experiments covering in-domain baselines, cross-dataset transfer, data scaling, MegaDetector preprocessing, grayscale vs. colour image conditions, and per-species transfer analysis. This work provides the first empirical characterisation of intra-African domain shift across both supervised and zero-shot architectures, and offers practical guidance for conservation AI practitioners who need to deploy models across the diverse ecosystems of Southern Africa without collecting new labelled data.

ContextThe movement of vertebrate hosts across urbanized landscapes can play a key role in the transmission of direct-contact diseases. Understanding how wildlife hosts move in urban landscapes, and how transmission is affected by their landscape-constrained and disease-altered movements, is imperative for better predicting the spread of disease. ObjectiveWe assess how the movement of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) according to landcover type, and their infection status, affect the spread of mange (caused by Sarcoptes scabiei) in an urbanized landscape. MethodsWe developed a mange transmission model (MTM) using an agent-based model to compare two movement behaviours of foxes in Scarborough (Ontario, Canada): random and landcover-based. We further assessed the effects of movement on disease transmission by considering the foxs infection status and comparing a range of movement probability scenarios. We quantified the number of effective contact events and the effective reproduction number (Re) according to each scenario. ResultsWe found that both landcover-dependent movement and infection status influenced the spread of mange within fox populations. The number of effective contact events and effective reproduction number Re was greatest when landscape heterogeneity was included in the model and foxes moved through paths of least resistance to movement, and when susceptible and infected foxes had an equal probability of leaving a fragmented habitat patch. ConclusionsOur findings suggest that mange spread may be accelerated along movement corridors in fragmented, heterogenous landscapes. As urban areas expand and remnant habitat within these is further lost and animals are relegated to fewer movement pathways, disease transmission may increase.

Fistulobalanus albicostatus Pilsbry, 1916 (Thoracica: Balanidae) is a tropical to temperate species distributed in the NW Pacific. The previously known northernmost record of this species in Japan was from Aomori Prefecture, at the northern end of Honshu Island, Japan. However, field surveys conducted in 2023 and 2026 confirmed the occurrence of F. albicostatus in Hakodate Bay, the southern end of Hokkaido, Japan, across the Tsugaru Strait, thereby extending the northern limit of its known distribution. A line transect survey conducted in May 2026 recorded seven living individuals within an area of 128 m. F. albicostatus was rare on the mid-high shores, accounting for only 2% of all barnacle individuals in a quadrat survey. The basal diameter of the living individuals ranged from 0.76 to 1.23 cm, and all individuals possessed ovaries. Based on characteristics of both morphological and COI gene, the specimens were identified as F. albicostatus, and belonged to the same haplotype of populations that are present in Honshu Island. The establishment of F. albicostatus in Hokkaido suggests an ongoing northward range shift of this warm-water species, with the potential for further expansion under continued ocean warming.