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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Biodiversity

Norms And Variance Fail To Predict Butterfly Effects On Social Dynamics By Idiosyncratic Individuals, Stephen F. Stringham, Lynn Rogers, Ann Bryant Jul 2024

Norms And Variance Fail To Predict Butterfly Effects On Social Dynamics By Idiosyncratic Individuals, Stephen F. Stringham, Lynn Rogers, Ann Bryant

Animal Sentience

Adaptations and adjustments to current environmental conditions are manifest in behavioral norms. Knowing norms facilitates population-level prediction, but doesn’t predict individual behavior where idiosyncrasies might trigger “butterfly effects." Knowledge of individual quirks is particularly important for risk assessment and management during close encounters between humans and potentially lethal wildlife, including bears (Ursus spp.). Innovative foraging techniques can alter population vigor and viability. Traits at the tails of a bell curve might hold the greatest potential for adapting to environmental change.


Wildlife Conservation: The Importance Of Individual Personality Traits And Sentience, Karen A. Owens, Gosia Bryja, Marc Bekoff Jul 2024

Wildlife Conservation: The Importance Of Individual Personality Traits And Sentience, Karen A. Owens, Gosia Bryja, Marc Bekoff

Animal Sentience

Individual differences in personality types within the same species have been studied much less than differences between species and populations. Personality differences are related to risk-taking and exploration, which in turn correlate with individuals' daily responses, decisions, and fitness. Bold and shy personality types can have different advantages and disadvantages under different social or environmental pressures. Analyzing personality differences has helped clarify how elk habituate to a well-populated area and how management strategies can be adapted to them. For wolves newly repatriated to Colorado, individual personality factors are likely to prove important for adapting to their new homes as well …


Wildlife Conservation And Adaptation To Humans, Valeria Mazza Phd, Claudio Carere Jan 2024

Wildlife Conservation And Adaptation To Humans, Valeria Mazza Phd, Claudio Carere

Animal Sentience

For many animal species, the ability to adapt to coexistence with the human species and to the environmental changes that humans cause is a biological imperative. This adaptive capacity varies not only between species, but within species. Studying individual differences in animals’ behavioral, cognitive and physiological adaptability is important for integrating ethology and conservation. Findings about animal cognitive capacities, including learning, need to be applied in conservation—but humans need to be educated about ethology, coexistence and conservation too.


Challenging Our Conception Of Wildness, Elodie Massiot Jan 2020

Challenging Our Conception Of Wildness, Elodie Massiot

Animal Sentience

Baker & Winkler (2020) point out the entanglement among free-living elephants, captive elephants, and humans in the elephant tourism industry. Where all living beings – captive and free-living – are more or less affected by human presence or activity, the binary notion of wild and captive, and in situ and ex situ conservation, becomes inadequate. B&W challenge our concept of wildness – and hence of rewilding – and our level of intervention in this wildness of which we are a component.


Game Theory And Artificial Intelligence In Just Preservation, David L. Dowe, Nader Chmait Jan 2020

Game Theory And Artificial Intelligence In Just Preservation, David L. Dowe, Nader Chmait

Animal Sentience

We humans can show presumption, arrogance and many dubious traits. By virtue of being land-dwelling, dexterous, relatively intelligent, and having good communication hardware and (good) fortune, we have for recent millennia largely had dominion of our planet. Yet humans often do not treat themselves (let alone other species) particularly well. Treves et al.’s idea of a multispecies justice system — not “prioritizing humans” but “finding practical ways to work within human systems” — invites consideration.


Wildlife Health Systems, Lee Skerratt Jan 2020

Wildlife Health Systems, Lee Skerratt

Animal Sentience

Wildlife health systems aim to ensure that all animal life is healthy and resilient. They protect biodiversity and ecosystem services and ensure that the risk of spillover of pathogens is mitigated. These systems are flexible, multidisciplinary and cross-sectorial. They can manage a variety of threats to life that arise in different communities and cultures. Very small investments are required to ensure that wildlife health systems function effectively.


Just Preservation, Trusteeship And Multispecies Justice, Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila, Adrian Treves, William Lynn Jan 2020

Just Preservation, Trusteeship And Multispecies Justice, Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila, Adrian Treves, William Lynn

Animal Sentience

We are grateful to all the commentators who engaged with our target article. Some commentators have offered important insights into our proposed design and methods for legally intervening on behalf of futurity. Others have focused on theoretical considerations central to our proposal for multispecies justice and trusteeship. All have inspired modifications and further elaboration of our initial proposal. In this Response, we engage with the commentaries, integrating their suggestions, striving for convergence and complementarity, but also discussing points of divergence with our proposed framework where necessary. There is substantial overlap in the points of view of the three co-authors, but …


Just Preservation, Adrian Treves, Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila, William S. Lynn Jan 2019

Just Preservation, Adrian Treves, Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila, William S. Lynn

Animal Sentience

We are failing to protect the biosphere. Novel views of conservation, preservation, and sustainability are surfacing in the wake of consensus about our failures to prevent extinction or slow climate change. We argue that the interests and well-being of non-humans, youth, and future generations of both human and non-human beings (futurity) have too long been ignored in consensus-based, anthropocentric conservation. Consensus-based stakeholder-driven processes disadvantage those absent or without a voice and allow current adult humans and narrow, exploitative interests to dominate decisions about the use of nature over its preservation for futurity of all life. We propose that authentically non-anthropocentric …


The Intrinsic Value Of Nature, Joanna E. Lambert Jan 2019

The Intrinsic Value Of Nature, Joanna E. Lambert

Animal Sentience

Treves et al. explain the need to preserve the rights of nonhuman species, human youth, and future generations. Although conservation biology has claimed to have an intrinsic valuation ethic since its inception in the 1980s, many aspects of the field have taken a decidedly anthropocentric and instrumentalist trajectory. This has important consequences for conservation-related policy and practice at all scales: local, regional, and global.