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Abstract: The behavioral mechanisms by which urban wildlife adapt to urban landscapes and disturbances within these environments are poorly understood. Such understanding can be important for wildlife managers, especially if the species is of concern to human and pet safety, such as the coyote (Canis latrans). Here, we evaluate coyote tolerance to the presence of humans, pets, and anthropogenic landscapes, to better understand how coyotes are conditioned to live in urbanizing landscapes. Using continuous focal follow and instantaneous scan sampling, we collected data on metrics of anthropogenic development and coyote flight response. We used cumulative link mixed models to determine that intensity of behavioral response to observation was impacted by habitat, human visitation to sites, and coyote group composition. These data may be useful to managers for profiling potentially problematic individual animals and identifying strategies for human–coyote coexistence.

Human-wildlife interactions, including human-wildlife conflict, are increasingly common as expanding urbanization worldwide creates more opportunities for people to encounter wildlife. Wildlife-vehicle collisions, zoonotic disease transmission, property damage, and physical attacks to people or their pets have negative consequences for both people and wildlife, underscoring the need for comprehensive strategies that mitigate and prevent conflict altogether. Management techniques often aim to deter, relocate, or remove individual organisms, all of which may present a significant selective force in both urban and nonurban systems. Management-induced selection may significantly affect the adaptive or nonadaptive evolutionary processes of urban populations, yet few studies explicate the links among conflict, wildlife management, and urban evolution. Moreover, the intensity of conflict management can vary considerably by taxon, public perception, policy, religious and cultural beliefs, and geographic region, which underscores the complexity of developing flexible tools to reduce conflict. Here, we present a cross-disciplinary perspective that integrates human-wildlife conflict, wildlife management, and urban evolution to address how social-ecological processes drive wildlife adaptation in cities. We emphasize that variance in implemented management actions shapes the strength and rate of phenotypic and evolutionary change. We also consider how specific management strategies either promote genetic or plastic changes, and how leveraging those biological inferences could help optimize management actions while minimizing conflict. Investigating human-wildlife conflict as an evolutionary phenomenon may provide insights into how conflict arises and how management plays a critical role in shaping urban wildlife phenotypes.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a global phenomenon with serious implications for biodiversity conservation and human well-being. Innovative solutions demand greater attention to the social factors contributing to HWC, including human thought and behavior, which can be examined through the lens of social psychology. Using the case of human-coyote conflict in North America, this study employed a mixed-methods social psychology approach to explore the potential for citizen science to serve as a tool for HWC mitigation. Quantitative surveys and interviews with volunteers in a coyote-focused citizen science program in Colorado revealed that the program is positively affecting participants' attitudes/beliefs and empowering them to take action to address conflicts in their communities. The article concludes with recommendations for future evaluative research in this area as well as ways to more generally improve social-psychology applications in wildlife conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When livestock are killed by predators, circumstantial evidence is often the only information available to determine which predator species made the kill. Evidence can consist of rake marks, scat, hair, attack points, tracks, sightings, and canine punctures. Canine punctures in particular can be informative because they offer the most direct evidence of attack, particularly if they are linked to tissue hemorrhaging. When investigating canine punctures, a common technique to identify the predator species is to measure the canine cusp spread for maxillary and mandibular tips as measured from the maxillary to maxillary tip or mandibular to mandibular tip. The assumption is that different predator species will have different and distinct canine spread. Surprisingly, little has been published on canine spread and comparing different carnivore species, leaving wildlife managers unable to reliably use this technique for predator identification. During 2008, we started a project to assess the width of canine spread in carnivores. The majority of information gathered to date shows a narrow range of measurements for coyotes and broad variation in feral/free ranging dogs that can overlap coyote measurements. The information provided on scientifically measured canine spread will assist the wildlife damage manager in determining the actual predatory species, especially when used with additional evidence gathered on site.

Some animal species are responding to climate change by altering the timing of events like mating and migration. Such behavioral plasticity can be adaptive, but it is not always. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) from the southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation have mostly remained on ice year‐round, but as the climate warms and summer sea ice declines, a growing proportion of the subpopulation is summering ashore. The triggers of this novel behavior are not well understood. Our study uses a parametric time‐to‐event model to test whether biological and/or time‐varying environmental variables thought to influence polar bear movement and habitat selection also drive decisions to swim ashore. We quantified the time polar bears spent occupying offshore sea ice of varying ice concentrations. We evaluated variations in the ordinal date bears moved to land with respect to local environmental conditions such as sea ice concentration and wind across 10 years (2005–2015). Results from our study suggest that storm events (i.e., sustained high wind speeds) may force polar bears from severely degraded ice habitat and catalyze seasonal movements to land. Unlike polar bears long adapted to complete summer ice melt, southern Beaufort Sea bears that summer ashore appear more tolerant of poor‐quality sea ice habitat and are less willing to abandon it. Our findings provide a window into emergent, climatically mediated behavior in an Arctic marine mammal vulnerable to rapid habitat decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]