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  • Wildlife population estimation and monitoring

    Reliable data on animal distribution and abundance are required to advance ecological inquiry and guide wildlife management. Data must be collected at appropriately large spatial and temporal scales to capture relevant processes for wide-ranging species and regional planning. Robust models are needed to project inferences into unsampled space and time, and inherent uncertainty must be […]

  • Coexisting with large carnivores

    Large mammalian carnivores represent a particular challenge for wildlife management. They can generate significant support for conservation and their loss may cause cascading effects through an ecosystem. However, carnivore populations require large, interconnected habitats with abundant prey, and frequently create conflict with remote or expanding human communities. Coexisting with carnivores therefore requires a landscape-level perspective […]

  • Mammal community dynamics in altered ecosystems

    Despite their important ecological roles and socioeconomic significance, many terrestrial mammal populations are threatened by a range of anthropogenic stressors, including hunting, habitat loss, and climate change. Other mammals successfully exploit anthropogenic environments due to changes in habitat suitability or predation pressure. Wildlife management has typically focused on single-species assessments and actions, yet a fuller […]

  • Assessing and advancing conservation effectiveness

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Welcome to the Wildlife Coexistence Lab at UBC!

We are a group of researchers in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Our research is focused on human-wildlife coexistence across multiple species and scales, with a particular emphasis on large-bodied terrestrial mammals.

The lab is led by Dr. Cole Burton, Associate Professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management, and Canada Research Chair in Terrestrial Mammal Conservation.

 

News

WildCo PhD’s x2!!

April 13, 2023

We are absolutely thrilled to share that Dr’s Cheng Chen and Cindy Hurtado both successfully defended their PhDs last Thursday! Cindy and Cheng were some of the original WildCo Lab members, and are the first PhD students to come out of WildCo! Cheng’s thesis research focused on using a global camera trap dataset to look […]

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News

WildCo PhD’s x2!!

April 13, 2023

We are absolutely thrilled to share that Dr’s Cheng Chen and Cindy Hurtado both successfully defended their PhDs last Thursday! Cindy and Cheng were some of the original WildCo Lab members, and are the first PhD students to come out of WildCo!

Cheng’s thesis research focused on using a global camera trap dataset to look at the responses of mammal communities to human disturbance and protected areas, and you can check out some of his already published work here: https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12865.

Cindy’s research looked at habitat suitability and landscape connectivity for carnivore species in the dry forest of Peru and Ecuador, with a focus on puma as a potential umbrella species in the system. Check out some of her work estimating habitat suitability for pumas across the area using pre-existing literature here: https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyac006.

Stay tuned for more to come from both of these incredible researchers!

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News

New Papers on Great Ape Biology & Conservation

March 24, 2023

We study a broad range of wildlife species and are happy to share two recent publications co-authored by WildCo researcher Jacqui Sunderland-Groves on Critically Endangered great apes. As great ape populations continue to decline across their range understanding their basic biology, current distribution and abundance is crucial for planning effective conservation actions. Check out these […]

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News

New Papers on Great Ape Biology & Conservation

March 24, 2023

We study a broad range of wildlife species and are happy to share two recent publications co-authored by WildCo researcher Jacqui Sunderland-Groves on Critically Endangered great apes. As great ape populations continue to decline across their range understanding their basic biology, current distribution and abundance is crucial for planning effective conservation actions. Check out these new publications which provide updated knowledge to support future conservation efforts for two of the rarest great ape subspecies found in Africa and south-east Asia.

Cross River gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli) https://doi.org/10.3390/genes14030743

Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus) https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.12916

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News

New Lab Paper: Behavioral “bycatch” from camera trap surveys yields insights on prey responses to human-mediated predation risk

September 26, 2022

We are so excited to share this paper investigating how human disturbance is affecting predator-prey relationships in Alberta’s boreal forest. We were able to use previously collected camera trap data to assess behavioural responses of prey species, moose (Alces alces), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and caribou (Rangifer tarandus) in areas with differing levels of industrial […]

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News

New Lab Paper: Behavioral “bycatch” from camera trap surveys yields insights on prey responses to human-mediated predation risk

September 26, 2022

We are so excited to share this paper investigating how human disturbance is affecting predator-prey relationships in Alberta’s boreal forest. We were able to use previously collected camera trap data to assess behavioural responses of prey species, moose (Alces alces), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and caribou (Rangifer tarandus) in areas with differing levels of industrial disturbance and predation risk. We found that the prey species were more risk-averse in the more disturbed landscape with higher predation risk. This is an important finding given that the caribou in this area area increasingly threatened by disturbance and predation.

This paper was truly a lab effort. It was started at the first WildCo Lab retreat in February of 2020, and involved now past and current undergrad, masters and PhD students, and post-doc researchers from the lab, with our PI Cole Burton leading the charge. We are so happy to have it out in the world and to showcase yet another use of camera trap data!

Where we started:

Where we ended up:

Details are in the caption following the image

 

Check out the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9108

 

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Check out the WildCo Lab’s and Cole’s personal Twitter feeds and our Instagram for more information.

 

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Wildlife Coexistence Lab
Faculty of Forestry
Department of Forest Resources Management
2204 - 2424 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z4
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