Gabriele Cozzi

A collaborative success story – how tourism can help research and benefit from it

by

Over the past few years, as part of a collaborative effort between the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and the Botswana Predator Conservation (BPC) and supported by the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National parks, we have equipped dispersing African wild dogs with GPS/Satellite radio collars. The aim of the project is (i) to follow dispersers after emigration from the natal group and to investigate the effect of landscape characteristics on dispersal distance, time and movements, and (ii) to gather crucial demographic parameters such as mortality rate, settlement success, and reproductive success after settlement in a new territory.

Recently, an unusually large coalition of eight brothers born in 2018 has emigrated from their natal pack inhabiting the Third Bridge – Budumtau – Xini region of Moremi Game Reserve. Thanks to the GPS data regularly sent to a base station via the Iridium satellite system, we have been able to remotely follow their movements. After emigration, they covered over 175 km in only five days before hitting the permanent swamp that surrounds the Kwedi Concession in the northern side of the Okavango Delta. During the past month they have been stationary in an area of about 180 km2 stretching between Vumbura Plains Lodge and Mapula Lodge. But dots on a map represent only a small part of the story… Are the eight brothers still together or have they split? What have they been doing? Have they met unrelated females and formed a new pack?

Figure: Movement trajectory of a dispersing coalition of eight male African wild dogs

Despite the collar sends us regular information, keeping up with the dogs over such large areas is almost impossible, unless we can capitalize on “the many eyes out there”. Tourists, guides, camp managers, all can contribute with their sightings towards research. No sooner said than done. We informed people at the lodges about the presence of the dogs in their area and asked them to report of any sighting and to send as many pictures as possible. Just a few days later we received the first information: a group of 9 dogs, including a collared dog, had been seen a few kilometres north of Vumbura Plains by the lodge staff. The pictures allowed identifying five of the original eight males and four unknown females. As expected, the males had indeed split and three brothers had probably gone a separate way. Or had they died during dispersal? An answer to the question arrived just a week later when a second sighting of 12 dogs was reported to us near Bushman Plains camp. Again, thanks to the pictures sent to us, we were able to identify the three missing brothers, who had clearly not died, among the 12 dogs. Future sightings will tell if this newly formed pack composed of 12 dogs will remain together or if some individuals will spin off (process known as secondary dispersal) searching for new mates with whom to build the own pack. But why would some undergo the risks of a second dispersal? Well, because of the eight males and four females only one of each sex will become dominant and reproduce. The others who will remain will help raise future pups but won’t directly reproduce. Therefore, some dogs may decide to take on the extra risk and continue dispersing. Bets are open, and chances are that the three brothers will part again. Time, and your sightings (!), will tell.

We, researcher, can benefits from any report and sightings, as it has been the case here. In return will be able to centralize all information and put together all pieces of the puzzle to share our knowledge with policy makers, stakeholders, and the tourism industry.

Please, keep sharing your sightings with us, of both collared and non-collared individuals, to help us protecting these amazing animals.

Upcoming Workshop: Spatial Dimension in Animal Management and Conservation

by

“…The scope of the workshop is to investigate several aspects of animal movement and spatial use and to relate them to newest challenges in wildlife management and conservation…”

 

10–15 January 2021

Faido, Ticino, Switzerland

 

Understanding how animals respond to human-induced degradation and fragmentation of suitable habitats is critical for developing appropriate management and conservation plans. New technologies have made it possible to collect animal location data and remotely sensed environmental data at finer spatial and temporal scales. This workshop will provide participants with a quantitative toolset to leverage these data sources so that they can address emerging questions in the field of animal movement ecology.

During day one, participants will learn how to source landscape information through freely available remote sensing imagery and to import, manipulate, and represent georeferenced environmental data in R. Environmental data may represent ecological (e.g. habitat types, topography) or human activities (e.g. landscape use, settlements distribution). The aim of day one is to give participants a toolset that enables them to obtain and prepare environmental information that can be used to understand and explain animal movement patterns and space use.

Day two will be dedicated to the decomposition of movement trajectories and characterization of movement modes and phases. Participants will be exposed to the concept of net-squared displacement, an analytical method used to classify movement trajectories into alternative modes such as sedentarism, nomadism, dispersal, and migration. These statistics can be fed into generalized linear mixed models to investigate the factors responsible for the emergence of such patterns.

During day three, participants will be exposed to methods commonly used to quantify animal home ranges; the pros and cons of these methods will also be discussed. Alternative methods such as minimal convex polygons, kernel density estimators, local convex hulls, and brownian bridges will be presented. Particular attention will be given to the temporal scale of the analysis and on the environmental and anthropogenic factors that influence home ranges.

During the next day, we will use presence/absence data to analyze habitat selection and create species distribution models. Participants will be exposed to the most common methods used to investigate habitat preferences such as resource-selection functions, step-selection functions and integrated step-selection functions. Assumptions and limitations of each method will be addressed.

Finally, during the last day, participants will discover how to apply what they learned during the first four days of the workshop to develop evidence-based recommendations for the management of their study subject. In particular, participants will learn how to create various connectivity maps. Connectivity between populations is one of the most important aspects in the management of wild population in human-dominated landscapes. Lastly, we will discuss new research avenues and research gaps that will need to be addressed in the future for the integration of the spatial dimension in the conservation and management of animal species.

For additional information and registration please contact Gabriele Cozzi at gabriele.cozzi@uzh.ch

This workshop is supported through funding by the UZH Graduate Campus

Please note: the date may be changed due to the current Corona virus situation

Sometimes they disperse alone…

by

Our ‘little earth man’ Nino, (please pass me the translation from the German form, Erdmännchen), has done it! He has left the natal group.

Nino has successfully defended his PhD thesis at the end of November and is now ready for a new adventure…out there.

Typically meerkats disperse in small coalitions of two or more individuals, for they find strength in the number. Our previous dispersing trio proves it! Nino went alone, which is quite unusual for meerkats. So he may come back home, like the majority of the single dispersers or, being a very resilient disperser, he may also be successful alone elsewhere. According to what is written in his thesis (shall we really trust his work…?), the task will now be to find some conspecifics of the opposite sex and a territory to settle…

Congrats and good luck for the future, Nino!

 

 

The walk of life: African wild dog dispersal and what it means for management and conservation

by

The African wild dog is Africa’s most endangered large carnivore and is listed as endangered in the IUCN Red List. Less than 6’000 free-ranging individuals survive in the wild and the species has been given very high conservation priority.

The African wild dog, like few other territorial land species, is characterized by the need for vast semi-pristine and undisturbed areas. This peculiarity makes it particularly vulnerable to habitat loss, deterioration, and fragmentation. This highlights the importance of landscape connectivity between subpopulations in and around protected areas.

A deeper understanding of where and how resident packs and dispersing individuals move, and the demographic consequences of dispersal, is therefore important for the management and conservation of the species over larger landscapes such as the Kavango-Zambesi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA/TFCA).

On Christmas day 2018, we were able to observe the first high-resolution trans boundary dispersal from Botswana’s Okavango Delta to Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. This journey highlights the central role of Botswana in the KAZA/TFCA trans boundary conservation effort, as well as the role of the African wild dog as a flagship species.

On 16th December 2018, four sisters dispersed from their pack resident just outside Moremi Gamer Reserve in Botswana. The pack is part of a long term study and is regularly followed by our collaborators on site, the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. This dispersing coalition is somehow unusual, as it is composed of females born to the same mother but in three different litters (in three consecutive years). The coalition dispersed in an almost straight line moving east and crossed the Zimbabwean border after covering an astonishing 280 km. They continued and covered additional 100 km within Hwange National Park, totalling 360 km in only nine days! Thanks to a collaboration with the Zimbabwean-based Painted Dog Conservation Program, we were able to confirm that all four females are still alive and in good conditions. As they seem to have slowed down a little, the daily covered distance much decreased in the past few days, we expect them to soon associate with unrelated males. The formation of a new pack and the settlement in a new territory is the ultimate goal of dispersal, as successful dispersal allow gene flow between subpopulations and for the recolonisation of empty areas.

We will be able to continue monitoring this dispersal event, thanks to the Satellite technology in the radio collar and to the support of the folks at Painted Dog Conservation in Zimbabwe.  Stay tune for more updates on these girls and on future dispersers.

Trans boundary dispersal event from Botswana’s Okavango Delta to Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. The blue line represents the dispersal trajectory, the yellow line the international boundaries. The red square represents the last recorded location.

New year old habit – An additional award to a Popecol member

by

Congratulations to Dominik for winning the prestigious Southwood Price of the British Ecological Society for the best paper by an early career researcher. His paper, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, combines human acceptance and habitat suitability to create a unified socio-ecological suitability model to better understand patterns of wolf expansion and recolonisation in Switzerland.

This prize adds to the list of prizes and awards won by Popecol members: Sara, Pritish, Dominik, Agnes, Sam, Gabriele.

Congratulations to Dominik and all others!

 

Movement Ecology Summer School – August 2017

by
It is our pleasure to announce the 2017 Movement Ecology Summer School (MESS) organised through the Life Science Zurich Graduate School, PhD Ecology Program. The MESS will be held in Faido (Ticino, Switzerland) during 27.8 – 1.9.2017.
The course builds on the expertise and positive feed-backs of the past summer schools. For this year too, we were able to secure the participation of leading scientists in the field of movement ecology and remote sensing:
Dr. Gabriela Schaepman-Strub (Zurich University)
Prof. John Fieberg (University of Minnesota)
Prof. Luca Börger (Swansea University)
Dr. Gabriele Cozzi (Zurich University)
 
This one-week course covers several aspects of animal movement ecology and includes both theoretical and conceptual and practical sessions. The course builds on analytical complexity and leads the participant through several steps. During day one, the participants will learn to source landscape information through available remote sensing imagery and to import, manipulate and represent geographical data into R. Day two will be dedicated to the decomposition of movement trajectories and characterisation of movement modes and phases. During day three the participants will be exposed to common methods used in the calculation of home ranges and discuss the pros and cons. During the next day we will use presence/absence data to analyze habitat selection. Finally, during the last day, the participants will be exposed to some new tools and methodologies to include data from alternative sensors (e.g. accelerometers) in the study of animal movements. Fundamental aspects such as study design, spatial autocorrelation, sources of error and time varying covariates will be discussed. Data sets will be provided but the participants are encouraged to bring their own data. Active participation during the course is required to obtain 2 ECTS credit points.
 
Please note, this course is organised for PhD students of the Life Science Zurich Graduate School. Priority will be given to students registered in the PhD Program in Ecology, however PhD and MSc students from other universities may attend if there are available places. 
 
Please do not hesitate to contact me (gabriele.cozzi@uzh.ch) for further information