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.