Search

Supplementary feeding of wildlife is widespread, being undertaken by more than half of households in many countries. However, the impact that these supplemental resources have is unclear, with impacts largely considered to be restricted to urban ecosystems. We reveal the pervasiveness of supplementary foodstuffs in the diet of a wild bird using metabarcoding of blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) faeces collected in early spring from a 220 km transect in Scotland with a large urbanization gradient. Supplementary foodstuffs were present in the majority of samples, with peanut (Arachis hypogaea) the single commonest (either natural or supplementary) dietary item. Consumption rates exhibited a distance decay from human habitation but remained high at several hundred metres from the nearest household and continued to our study limit of 1.4 km distant. Supplementary food consumption was associated with a near quadrupling of blue tit breeding density and a 5-day advancement of breeding phenology. We show that woodland bird species using supplementary food have increasingUKpopulationtrends, while species thatdonot, and/orare outcompeted by blue tits, are likely to be declining. We suggest that the impacts of supplementary feeding are larger and more spatially extensive than currently appreciated and could be disrupting population and ecosystem dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying and understanding ecological drivers that influence wildlife populations is challenging but critical for conservation. This typically requires integrating long‐term data on both the population and potential drivers within statistical models that are suitable for analysing these complex relationships. State‐space models offer one method for integrating such data. Once implemented within a Bayesian framework, these analyses can control for multifactorial influences on populations, allowing one to extract otherwise undetectable correlations between the environment and the underlying, inferred demography.In the Moray Firth, Scotland, harbour seals have been counted annually for 30 years (1988–2018). A Bayesian state‐space model was used to explore whether patterns in vital rates were correlated to changes in prey abundance, inter‐specific competition (grey seal abundance), environmental variables [the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and sea‐surface temperature], or level of biotoxins (saxitoxin and domoic acid) in the Moray Firth waters.The credible interval of the posterior distributions of three of these covariate coefficients (sandeel proxy, NAO and grey seal abundance) suggested that there was a relationship between those covariates and vital rates. Both the sandeel proxy and NAO showed a positive correlation with fecundity, whereas grey seal abundance had a negative impact on pup survival.This work demonstrates how an integrated state‐space modelling approach can bring together diverse data sets and point to important interactions with prey, and with other predators in the system. This suggests that the wider‐scale management of UK harbour seal populations with their contrasting temporal trends needs to account for variation in the marine ecosystem at appropriate spatial scales, in line with current policy concerning spatial planning in the marine environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Deprived and declining areas in Scotland have poorer health than other areas in the rest of Scotland. Using data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study, this paper examines whether differential migration over a one year period can explain these differences. Compared with migrants to and from deprived and declining areas, stable residents in those areas were generally older, less well educated and less affluent. Continued disproportionate loss of more affluent and better educated individuals could result in deprived and declining areas becoming even more deprived over time. Migrants appeared to be in better health; however, this finding was reversed on adjustment for age. It may be that while the relationship between migration and socio-economic status is immediately apparent, the relationship between migration and health could take longer to develop. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The social gradient in health and mortality has been acknowledged for some time and, more recently, there is some evidence that the gap between the richer and poorer is widening in Britain. Other studies have also shown that health and mortality outcomes are worse in places that are experiencing population decline and better in places that are growing. This analysis examines, first, whether there is a mortality gap between the least and most deprived people in Scotland, second, whether this gap has widened since the 1980s and, third, whether the gap can be explained by patterns of population change. Our results demonstrate that the widening mortality gap in Scotland cannot be explained simply as an artefact of population change, even though it is widening most in those places that are experiencing population decline. This type of research is made possible by the reliable denominator population information provided in the 1981 and 2001 censuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A number of studies have shown that mortality rates are highest in areas that are experiencing population decline. A recent study suggests that this relationship disappears when area deprivation is accounted for. We extend this research to consider the relationship between population change and mortality in five Health Boards in the West of Scotland—a region with some of the worst mortality rates in Europe. For the area as a whole and all five Health Boards separately, we find a significant negative association between population change and mortality, but in each case this relationship disappears when small area deprivation is accounted for. This confirms our previous conclusion that it is more important to account for deprivation than population decline in health resource allocation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]