To conserve Andean bears in Peru, the best strategy may be to conserve high-altitude grasslands bordering cloud forests. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus) as vulnerable due to habitat loss, climate change and human conflict. Scientists knew that the bears eat flowering plants called bromeliads, but they didn’t know much about the bears’ foraging behavior and plant preferences. In a study published in PLOS ONE, researchers used trail cameras to answer some of these questions. They found that Andean bears foraged in only 16.7% of available bromeliad patches where they felt safe from human disturbance. The areas they chose were also places where livestock had grazed only a few decades prior. The researchers determined that conservation managers should focus on conserving high-altitude grasslands bordering cloud forests and should consider how livestock have used the area.
The Wildlife Society, through its continued partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, is excited to announce the availability of research assistantships for Native undergraduate or graduate students in the summer of 2025 as part of the Native American Research Assistantship (NARA) Program. Applications are being accepted now through Jan. 20, 2025. Visit this link for additional information and instructions on how to apply.
Established in 2014, NARA provides training for careers in natural resource and conservation-related fields, promotes Native student advancement in the wildlife profession and elevates Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) within federal research projects.
Hunter Grove participated in the NARA program during the summer of 2024. Credit: Hunter Grove
Hunter Grove, a 2024 program participant studying at Oregon State University, is enrolled in the Karuk Tribe and focused a NARA project on examining methods for detecting pregnancy in free-living mesocarnivores like wolverines (Gulo gulo) and Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis).
“I was able to enhance my professional path in many different ways thanks to the various opportunities I took advantage of while in the program,” Grove said of the program. “This includes meeting with Native grad students, helping with different projects and discussions with others.”
Applicants selected for NARA will engage with representatives from TWS while learning from and working with an interdisciplinary team of USFS Research and Development on a three-month research project. This year, we are seeking Native students for four projects during the summer of 2025. Each assistantship will include a paid stipend of at least $6,500.
Another 2024 participant, Nadira Mitchell, enrolled in the Navajo Nation and studying at the University of Arizona, worked alongside Serra Hoagland from the USFS to develop sections of a comprehensive Tribal Wildlife Management Plan that the Mescalero Apache Tribe requested.
“During my research assistantship, I was able to gain a real life experience in what it means to have a career in natural resources and wildlife management,” Mitchell said. “I was able to do fieldwork, remote sensing research, and also attend meetings with tribal leadership and leadership within the USDA Forest Service.”
For detailed information on the available opportunities in 2025 and instructions on how to apply, please visit the Native American Research Assistantship Program website.
Common murre colony numbers halved in the Gulf of Alaska following a marine heat wave. Scientists and other observers first discovered a massive mortality event in the seabirds in 2020 along the West Coast of the U.S. and Alaska. The University of Washington Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) discovered 62,000 carcasses in just one year. They believed a massive marine heat wave from 2014 to 2016 known as “the blob” caused the decline. In a study recently published in Science, researchers set out to estimate the total mortality of common murres (Uria aalge) and later effects from the heat wave. After analyzing 13 colonies surveyed between 2008 and 2022, they found that the colony size in the Gulf of Alaska halved after the heat wave. Colonies along the eastern Bering Sea declined 75%. “This study shows clear and surprisingly long-lasting impacts of a marine heat wave on a top marine predator species,” said Julia Parrish, a professor at the University of Washington and co-author of the study. “Importantly, the effect of the heat wave wasn’t via thermal stress on the birds, but rather shifts in the food web leaving murres suddenly and fatally without enough food.”
The New York Times recently covered a study published in The Journal of Wildlife Management titled, “Rehabilitating tigers for range expansion: lessons from the Russian Far East.”
If you haven’t read The New York Timesarticle yet, I encourage you to do so. The author delivers a feel-good story ripe for the holiday season. Underlying the “unlikely love story” and fairy tale prince, though, is a novel success in big cat reintroductions with wide-ranging conservation implications. You can read the full study here. Members of The Wildlife Society receive free access to all papers published in The Journal of Wildlife Management.
After reading The New York Times article, our journal team started wondering about other studies featured in the news. With a little help from our friends at Wiley and the magic of Altmetric® data, we can look back at the influence of TWS journals in 2024.
So far this year, studies published in TWS journals have been mentioned 455 times in news articles covering 108 days, 46 weeks and all 12 months of the year. In 2024, there was a good chance you saw our science in the news. So which papers received the most media attention? Let’s take a look.
Top 10 mentioned papers from TWS journals in news outlets:
Media coverage plays a crucial role in disseminating scientific knowledge to the general public. While TWS journals help further our scientific understanding of wildlife management along sound biological lines, articles like the one published by The New York Times help transform a complex topic into something accessible for the masses—a relatable story. This fosters greater awareness of current wildlife issues, highlights the importance of wildlife professionals, builds public trust in scientists and the scientific process, and hopefully inspires members of the next generation to pursue a career in wildlife science.
It should come as no surprise that TWS values media coverage that builds a more informed and engaged public. In fact, earlier this year, TWS Council approved a new strategic plan that prioritizes TWS’ external influence with goals like, “increase public engagement and interest in wildlife by expanding TWS’ communications and member exposure,” and “support and coordinate with organizations focused on increasing public engagement and interest in wildlife through communications and education.” As we enter 2025, we hope to build upon the success of this year and bring even more attention to our members and the science being published in our journals.
Our Altmetric® assessment also reveals a wealth of other equally exciting data. In 2024, TWS journals were cited in at least 159 government reports, management recommendations and plans and other policy documents in five different countries. This includes publications from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the USDA Forest Service, the Scottish Government, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Publications Office of the European Union, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the California Fire Science Consortium.
Finally, while our journals didn’t quite hit trending status on social media, like this TWS post on Instagram, we did see some traction. In 2024, TWS journals were mentioned in over 1,655 posts on the social media platform X. This includes 749 X mentions for the paper, Insect pollinators: The time is now for identifying species of greatest conservation need, published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, in July 2024.
Thank you to all of the authors, reviewers, editors, field crews and others who contributed to the advancement of wildlife science this year. The Wildlife Society would not exist without your efforts. Wishing you all a happy new year!
Are you publishing your science in a Society-owned journal? For many nonprofit, professional societies like TWS, publications are crucial to the mission and operations of the organization. By publishing in a Society-owned journal you are not only contributing to the advancement of science but also supporting the organizations that help advocate for science, provide resources to professionals, uphold professional ethics, build stronger communities, and recruit the next generation of professionals.
As droughts become more frequent and more prolonged throughout the United States, it may become more difficult for many species to adapt to the changing conditions. Species that already inhabit dry climates, like the endangered giant kangaroo rat (Dipodomys ingens), may face plummeting populations due to compounding threats, including extensive loss of habitat. “The degree of increased drought exposure for each species in our analysis strongly depends on future greenhouse gas concentrations,” said Merijn van den Bosch, the lead author of the study. “But even under a lower-concentration scenario, virtually all vertebrates face increased year-long and multi-year droughts in the second half of this century. The implications will depend on the species and the length of the drought.”
The first sign that Thomas Gable and his colleagues were approaching a kill site was the calls of crows and eagles cutting through the winter silence in northern Minnesota.
The ecologist in the Voyageurs Wolf Project at the University of Minnesota was surveying wolf predation last winter when snowfall was particularly low. He and his colleagues had GPS collars on wolves in two packs near Voyageurs National Park. When data were relayed back to Gable and his team’s computer, they looked for the telltale cluster of location points that indicated a potential kill.
Many of these were areas where the wolves just slept, while others were kill sites. But if they didn’t get to the area quick enough—especially in the spring or fall—it was sometimes hard to detect, as the wolves often left few traces of their meals behind. “If you didn’t know a kill was there, you could miss it if you walked by,” Gable said, adding that the blood was mostly gone after a few days in some cases.
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
In other cases, there was still plenty of carnage—blood on the white snow, chunks of hair and leftover stomach contents of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Scavengers like bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) were still around picking at the remains.
The trouble was that the snow that made the detection of blood easier wasn’t often there. The winter of 2023-2024 saw some of the lowest snowfall in years. In fact, while temperatures are warming in this area due to climate change, the snowfall has increased in the past decade. Gable and his team already knew what wolf predation was like in the spring, summer and fall. But they wanted to get an idea of wolf (Canis lupus) predation in the winter. They assumed the weather would be typical for the season.
“We didn’t plan on last year being the mildest winter on record,” he said. “So, in some aspects, this study kind of fell into our lap.”
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
The data has so far revealed that a lack of winter snow may be putting wolves on leaner diets as deer become harder to capture. Gable and his colleagues detailed these findings in a study published recently in Ecology and Evolution.
“Wolves were really struggling to get a sufficient amount of food in that winter,” he said.
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
Starting in September 2023, the team collared one wolf in each pack with GPS devices. In the fall, they studied the predation behavior of wolves in six packs. They continued to study the predation behavior of two of those packs in the winter, and in spring they studied the predation behavior of wolves in five packs.
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
They also employed trail cameras to determine pack sizes.
Throughout this period, the team visited each presumed kill site based on the clusters of GPS locations. At the end of the study, they estimated how many deer each pack killed. They then divided this number by the number of wolves in the pack to determine how much food each wolf was getting.
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
Other research has revealed how many deer wolves kill in a typical year, as well as how much food a wolf needs each day to maintain its body weight. This is typically about 2.3 kilograms per day for the average wolf in the Voyageurs area, which are smaller than wolves in Yellowstone or in western Canada.
During this low-snow winter, the team estimated that each wolf in the packs they tracked only received about 2.1 kilograms per day, assuming no loss to scavengers like ravens (Corvus corax) and eagles. But in reality, scavengers likely consumed 10-20% of kills, meaning each wolf likely only received about 1.8-1.9 kilograms per day.
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
This drop in sustenance is particularly significant because the winter is usually an easier time for wolves in Minnesota. In the summer, it’s often harder for wolves to hunt deer, which are in better condition to escape predators due to abundant forage and lack of snow. They may eat a lot of fawns in June, but these animals are so small that wolves usually just squeak by in this period, Gable said. Plus, wolves also have cubs to feed at this time, which require additional food.
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
In the winter, heavy snowfall makes it difficult for deer to move, and the leafy vegetation that deer like to eat is absent. This makes them easier prey since there are weaker adult deer around. If heavy snow continues into spring, or there is a lot of late snow, these conditions can persist.
But last winter, low snowfall meant the deer could move around more easily and access forage through the colder months. “Mild winters are going to result in reduced predation success,” Gable said. “Most wolves were probably losing body weight throughout the majority of the winter.”
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
Luckily for the wolves of the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, last winter’s lack of snow was an anomaly. But if conditions change as the climate continues to warm over the decades, it could affect the way that wolves operate in this area. If milder winters make deer more difficult to catch, for example, the packs might be forced to expand their territory to find enough vulnerable deer.
Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project
This photo essay is part of an occasional series from The Wildlife Society featuring photos and video images of wildlife taken with camera traps and other equipment. Check out other entries in the series here. If you’re working on an interesting camera trap research project or one that has a series of good photos you’d like to share, email Josh at jlearn@wildlife.org.
A whiskered tern (Chlidonias hybrid) crash landing, a red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) stuck in a tree and a dancing insect are some of the highlights of Nikon’s 2024 Comedy Wildlife Awards. Each year, the competition receives thousands of images from around the world in an effort to not only make people laugh, but to help the public better understand wildlife and the importance of conservation. “Our world is extraordinarily beautiful and interconnected, yet the human race is doing its best to over-exploit and damage it. Issues of wildlife conservation and sustainability are gaining momentum globally, yet the messages and images tend to be negative, depressing and enervating,” said Comedy Wildlife co-founder Paul Joynson-Hicks. “Through the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, we aim to widen understanding and engagement of a sustainable world—and wildlife conservation specifically—for the preservation of biodiversity and the health and enrichment of everyone on Earth.”
People’s choice award category winner “Shake ruffle rattle and roll.” Credit: Tapani Linnanmaki / Nikon Comedy WildlifeNikon young photographer (under 25) category winner “Awkward smiley frog.” Credit: Kingston Tam / Nikon Comedy WildlifeNikon junior photographer (under 16) category winner “Smooching owlets.” Credit: Sarthak Ranganadhan / Nikon Comedy WildlifeFish and other aquatic animals category winner “Unexpected role swap.” Credit: Przemyslaw Jakubczyk / Nikon Comedy WildlifeBird category winner “Whiskered Tern crash on landing.” Credit: Damyan Petkov / Nikon Comedy WildlifeReptile and amphibians category winner “Frog in a balloon.” Credit: Eberhard Ehmke / Nikon Comedy WildlifeInsect category winner “Mantis Flamanca.” Credit: Jose Miquel Gallego Molina / Nikon Comedy WildlifeOverall winner “Stuck Squirrel.” Credit: Milko Miarchetti / Nikon Comedy Wildlife
Citizen science platforms like iNaturalist can help managers detect invasive species early after their arrival in a new area. In a study published in People and Nature, researchers obtained first detection records of 687 species in 30 European countries. These cases included both official records in scientific literature and information collected from citizen science platforms. The researchers found that the citizen science platforms detected these species before scientific literature half of the time. Citizen scientists were more likely to detect vertebrates earlier than plants or invertebrates. But the researchers also found that when species were on the European Union’s priority list for concern, the scientific literature had earlier official recordings. The study reveals that citizen science platforms are effective methods for detecting the early incursion of invasive species to new areas.
Federal and state governments spend millions of dollars building wildlife crossing structures in the U.S. to benefit species and mitigate vehicle collisions. But as climate changes, those structures may become less effective in capturing movement routes.
One team of researchers wondered if there was a way to include future climate projections when considering the placement of underpasses and overpasses.
“The connectivity value that wildlife crossing structures provide, in a contemporary sense, is very much related to climate adaptation,” said TWS member Justin Suraci, a senior scientist and director of wildlife conservation science at the nonprofit Conservation Science Partners. “But these crossing structures aren’t necessarily being designed or sited with those potential climate benefits in mind.”
Suraci is a co-first author of a study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment examining the value of crossing structures for supporting wildlife climate adaptation and using elk crossing in Colorado as a case study for integrating climate change into crossing structure planning and development.
Traditionally, managers determine where vehicle collisions are occurring and also use collar data to determine where to build crossing structures. But climate change can change migration behavior and alter the landscape. “Given that these things are massive economic investments and have lifespans of 50 to 70 years, our argument is that you should plan for where wildlife movements are likely to shift in the future.”
Suraci and his colleagues applied this idea to elk (Cervus canadensis) crossings on Colorado highways. The state of Colorado already performs studies on elk crossings on highways and their migratory routes. The researchers wanted to see how these current hot spots overlapped with predictions of future hot spots.
The researchers used elk GPS collar data and habitat selection and movement models to determine where future summer and winter ranges would be based on climate and land use projections.
They then overlapped the current areas where crossing structures would reduce elk-vehicle collisions with areas that would support elk migratory movements in the future, to determine which spots managers should prioritize. They found four spots that would be beneficial in both instances. Building crossing structures in these areas would benefit wildlife today as well as into the future, Suraci said.
The team is now working with the Nevada Department of Transportation and the Nevada Department of Wildlife on a similar project for that state. The partners have added climate consideration into the already existing criteria to consider when choosing where to place crossing structures.
Suraci hopes managers implement this and future research into transportation planning. “Just by being on the landscape and facilitating movement and connectivity today, crossing structures are already serving climate adaptation purposes or will be serving those purposes, like connecting the landscape, ensuring gene flow, promoting evolutionary adaptation, maintaining species interaction and ecological functions,” Suraci said. “Our additional contribution is to make the point that you can enhance the climate adaptation value of crossing structures by explicitly considering climate change when you’re siting these things.”
Caribou that migrate across northern Ontario adjust the way they move in a given winter based on the amount of snowfall.
This new discovery—the result of years of GPS tracking collar analysis—shows that the northern ungulates may be somewhat resilient to some of the effects of climate change.
“It’s possibly a positive to show that they have this flexibility,” said Alexis Pereira, a wildlife research analyst with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.
Ontario has two ecotypes of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou). The forest-tundra group typically moves from the peatlands around the coast of Hudson Bay, where they calve in the summer, to forested areas in the winter. These animals typically make their seasonal treks together in large herds.
The boreal, or forest-dwelling, ecotype is found farther south around James Bay. These individuals are more sedentary, not migrating as far when they do move. The females typically remain more isolated from other individuals in the summer when they calve rather than sticking to large communal calving grounds.
Pereira, who was a master’s student at the University of Guelph at the time of this research, and her colleagues wanted to see how weather conditions and other factors affected caribou migrations each year. They gathered tracking data from GPS collars placed on 109 caribou from both ecotypes between 2011 and 2018, with some years missing in the middle of that period.
Snowfall affects migration behavior
In a study published recently in the Journal of Wildlife Management, the team found that individual caribou in both the northern tundra-forest ecotype and the more southerly forest-dwelling ecotype were flexible in their yearly migrations. The average snowfall during the winter seemed to be the main factor dictating their migratory behavior.
For both ecotypes, caribou migrated longer distances when there was heavier snowfall. When there was less snowfall, the forest-dwelling caribou in the south either migrated less or didn’t migrate at all, while the forest-tundra caribou moved shorter distances. A few animals in the more nomadic group—the tundra-forest ecotype—in the north didn’t migrate some years, sticking around the coast of Hudson Bay in the winter.
This correlation between movement and snow surprised Pereira and her colleagues, since there’s a common idea that deep snow makes it harder to move. The team isn’t entirely sure why snow affects caribou migratory behavior—they only had yearly snowfall averages for this study rather than specific data from different regions. But Pereira speculated that heavy snowfall might affect their access to food, forcing them to travel larger distances to sustain themselves.
For example, for the forest-tundra ecotype, those individuals may move to wooded areas that offer more accessible lichen. While forests often do have deeper snow, lichen doesn’t only grow on the ground but also grows on tree trunks, where it might be less buried by snow and easier for caribou to reach.
Other factors that the team examined, such as vegetation estimates, didn’t seem to correlate with migration distance.
Neither did human disturbance. While some research in other parts of the North has found that caribou avoid linear features like roads, seismic lines or powerlines, since wolves (Canis lupus) use these to hunt moose (Alces alces) and occasionally caribou, Pereira’s team didn’t find such a relationship in northern Ontario.
Overall, she said that the discovery that woodland caribou migration is flexible is good news—as climate changes, this behavior suggests a degree of resilience. However, Pereira is concerned that if these changes in behavior occur for too long, they may forget how to go back to the former ways when conditions require it.
“This relationship of their migratory behavior with their environment is something that exists and should be taken into consideration in general in research,” she said.
This article features research that was published in a TWS peer-reviewed journal. Individual online access to all TWS journal articles is a benefit of membership. Join TWS now to read the latest in wildlife research.
