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One of the primary goals of conservation translocation programs should be the maintenance of both population demographic stability and genetic diversity. Here, we provide genetic management recommendations to inform a population reinforcement of the declining Egyptian Vulture population in the Balkans. Specifically, we examined whether the number of released individuals is sufficient to prevent genetic diversity loss due to random genetic drift and what the origin of the individuals should be that comprise the captive breeding pool. To this aim, we estimated and assessed genetic diversity levels and genetic structure of Egyptian Vulture populations across much of the species’ range using both neutral and non-neutral candidate loci involved in migration. We then evaluated the effects of the currently proposed population management scheme and candidate source populations on retaining allelic diversity. Our results show low differentiation values among populations and absence of genetic structure which point to past high gene flow. Furthermore, there was no predicted significant impact of different source populations on the genetic diversity of the recipient Balkan population. We also found that the declining Egyptian Vulture population in the Balkans still retains high levels of genetic diversity and therefore genetic diversity restoration is not currently needed. However, without any management, diversity is likely to decrease fast because of increased genetic drift as the population size continues to decline. Population reinforcement with nine birds per year for 20 years would provide sufficient demographic support for the population to retain > 85% of rare allelic diversity. Birds originating from the Balkans would ensure ecological and behavioral similarity and thus would be the best option for reinforcement. Nevertheless, our results demonstrate that to prevent further population contraction and loss of adaptive alleles, releasing individuals of different origin, European Union; HEAL-Link Greece; LIFE projects; “The Return of the Neophron” (LIFE programme); “Egyptian Vulture New LIFE” (LIFE programme, www.LifeNeophron.eu); Leventis Foundation and the MAVA Foundation; Israeli Academy of Science’s Adams Fellowship

Hematology is one of the best population health indicators, and the quickest way to gain insight into some hematological parameters is blood film evaluation. Sometimes, due to the inability to store blood, the unavailability of hematological instruments during field work, or the insufficient amount of blood for complete hematological analysis, blood film evaluation could be the only method for obtaining information about hematological changes. The population of brown bears (Ursus arctos) is often endangered, and is protected as an important integral species of terrestrial communities. Since any baseline hematological data of free-living endangered species are particularly important, the aim of this study was to test the possibility of using blood film evaluation, as the only source of hematological data, for assessment of an animal's hematological and, consequently, health status. Blood films of seventeen brown bears from eastern Turkey were evaluated to assess the morphology of erythrocytes and leukocytes, estimate the total leukocyte count, determine the differential leukocyte count, and look for the presence of cell inclusions or hemoparasites. Rouleaux formations were present in twelve animals, poikilocytosis in four, while parasitic nematodes, microfilariae, were found in nine out of seventeen bears. The results confirmed that blood film evaluation alone could be of use in assessing an animal's hematological status, but for more accurate assessment of health status, more blood parameters need to be analyzed. New findings in the study, such as the presence of rouleaux formations and microfilaria in brown bears from eastern Turkey, have opened the door for further investigation in this field., We are grateful to the Foundation Segré for providing most of the funding for this project. This research was also supported by other generous donors, including Arkadaşlar, Bilge Bahar, Faruk Eczacıbaşı, Seha İşmen, Ömer Külahçıoğlu, Burak Över, Batubay Özkan, Alan Peterson, Emin Özgür, Suna Reyent, Faruk Yalçın Zoo, National Geographic Society, Sigrid Rausing Trust, STGM, TANAP, Turkcell, the University of Utah, Iğdır University and the Whitley Fund. We thank the staff and volunteers of the KuzeyDoğa Society for their dedicated support.

Billions of birds annually migrate between breeding and nonbreeding grounds in North America. During fall 2020, there was a series of alarming mass-mortality events of migratory birds across the western United States, with estimates of 100,000 to 1 million birds having perished. One potential culprit behind these die-offs is wildfires, though there has been little research documenting the indirect effects of wildfires on actively migrating birds. We undertook a multi-year assessment of potential impacts that wildfires may have had on fall bird migration over the past decade, with a particular focus on fall 2020, using systematic bird banding data from southeastern Utah. We used a correlative approach to evaluate the relationship between estimates of acres burned by wildfires in western North America on several variables representing bird abundance and body condition. Notably, in our best fit models of birds banded at our research site during fall 2020, we found both a positive relationship for the number of bird captures and a negative relationship for body mass index with more daily burned acres. We provide an examination of incorporating lag effects of wildfires on different metrics of bird migration to account for potential impacts of fires on birds before migration and banding. Additionally, we assess the usefulness of different proxies of body condition in highly stressed land birds and introduce a scale for scoring emaciation of birds in the hand while banding. Our insights into avian migration ecology are one of the few studies that explore the role wildfires may have had in affecting migratory bird movements and health. / Des milliards d’oiseaux migrent chaque année entre les aires de nidification et celles en dehors de la saison de nidification en Amérique du Nord. Au cours de l’automne 2020, une série d’évènements alarmants de mortalité massive d’oiseaux migrateurs a eu lieu dans l’ouest des États-Unis, l’estimation d’oiseaux ayant péri oscillant entre 100, We are grateful for the generous support of the Hamit Batubay Ozkan Conservation Ecology Graduate Fellowship, Barbara J. Watkins Environmental Studies Graduate Fellowship, and the University of Utah Global Change and Sustainability Center, as well as Zach Lundeen for helping provide funds to support our bird banding operation.

Wildlife are under continuous pressure to adapt to new environments as more land area is converted for human use and human populations continue to concentrate in suburban and exurban areas. This is especially the case for terrestrial mammals, which are forced to navigate these habitat matrices on foot. One way in which mammals may occupy urbanized landscapes is by altering their temporal activity behavior. Typically, studies have found that mammals increase their nocturnal activity within urbanized environments to avoid overlap with humans. However, to date, the majority of studies on this topic have focused on single species, and studying whether this trend holds across an entire community has important ecological implications. Specifically, understanding how differences in species temporal activity response alters predator-prey dynamics and sympatric interspecies competition can provide insight into urban wildlife community assembly and provide a mechanistic understanding of species co-occurrence within these systems. In this study, we used data from a community science camera trapping project in northern Utah to elucidate how human influence alters the temporal activity behavior of five medium- to largesized mammals and how differences in species response affect predator-prey, human, and sympatric competitor temporal niche overlap. We found community-wide changes in activity across study sites, with increases in late night and midday activity and decreases in crepuscular activity within the more-urbanized site. However, species-specific behavioral changes varied, and these changes resulted in reduced overlap, especially between coyotes (Canis latrans) and their potential prey species. These results provide information on how human influence may alter community assembly and species-species interactions within a wildland-urban interface., University of Utah of Graduate Research Fellowship

Human development and roads threaten wildlife through distinct mechanisms and understanding the influence of these elements can better inform mitigation and conservation strategies. We used camera traps to quantify the effects of major roads, environmental factors, and human development on the mammalian community composition between sites north and south of a major interstate highway in northern Utah, USA. We found no significant differences in species richness nor community similarity across the north-south divide of the highway. Through Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we compared the effects of the distance to the highway, housing and human population density, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and the human footprint index to changes in mammalian community composition and species-specific habitat usage. Community occupancy response, similarity, and species richness were negatively affected by increased housing and human population densities and positively affected by increased NDVI and decreased human footprint, whereas their response to the highway was more inconclusive. We conclude that mammalian community composition in our study area is influenced by both environmental conditions and human development while the effect of the highway was more nuanced, possibly due to the presence of a newly constructed wildlife overpass. Taken together, the lack of differences in species richness or community composition across the highway suggests that it may not currently exacerbate the effects of other anthropogenic sources of habitat fragmentation and highlights the need for additional research into human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategies., NA