Biology subjects

Storch, I.

Publications and source records attributed to Storch, I..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Political legacies shape bear use of anthropogenic spaces

Romania hosts Europes largest brown bear population west of Russia, but rising human-bear encounters and related casualties raise concerns about their drivers and future population management. Using >10,000 encounter reports (2019-2024) in a hierarchical occupancy model accounting for detection processes, we show that bear presence in human-dominated spaces is linked to food conditioning, habituation, and shaped by historical management. Bears occur more often in high wildland-urban interface areas, especially those closer to communist-era elite-hunting grounds with feeding sites. These patterns reflect a long-term legacy of 1960s population management policies interacting with environmental and behavioral processes to shape recent bear behavior. We call for management addressing ecological and social sustainability by phasing out supplemental feeding, reducing habituation through a restored landscape of fear, improving public knowledge of bear ecology, and recognizing historical legacies to promote coexistence. HighlightsO_LIWe used hierarchical species occupancy models to analyze brown bears use of human-dominated spaces in Romania. C_LIO_LIBear detectability depends strongly on activity patterns of both bears and humans C_LIO_LIBear occurrence in anthropogenic spaces is strongly associated with high wildland-urban interface areas and abundant anthropogenic food waste. C_LIO_LIBear occurrence in WUI areas is modulated by historical population management legacies. C_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Species associations and management intensity modulate the habitat niche breadth of forest birds

Species associations can have profound effects on the realized habitat niche of species, indicating that habitat structure alone cannot fully explain observed abundances. To account for this aspect of community organization in niche modelling, we developed multi-species abundance models, incorporating the local effect of potentially associated species, alongside with environmental ones, targeting mainly forest management intensity. We coupled it with a landscape-scale analysis to further examine the role of management intensity in modifying the habitat niche in connection with the landscape context. Using empirical data from the Black Forest in southern Germany, we focused on the forest bird assemblage and in particular on the cavity nester and canopy forager guilds. We included in the analysis species that co-occur and for which evidences suggest association is likely. Our findings show that the local effect of species associations can moderate the effects of management intensity. We also found that species express a larger habitat niche breadth in intensively managed forests, depending on the landscape context. Species associations may facilitate the utilization of a broader range of environmental conditions under intensive forest management, which benefits some species over others. Such network of associations may be a relevant factor in the effectiveness of conservation-oriented forest management.

ecology↗