About this book
This book aims to propose a protocol for wildlife monitoring, especially in human-altered environments like agricultural and silvicultural landscapes. Its target audience includes wildlife biologists both in governmental sectors and NGOs, as well as scientists, university faculty, and graduate/undergraduate students at the wildlife management and correlated fields, such as biological conservation, sustainable use, human-wildlife coexistence, and wildlife surveys/monitoring. The main topics presented and discussed in detail are connected to conceptual, technological, and societal innovations, including a proposed protocol for long-term crossing of spatial scales to standardise wildlife monitoring at agricultural/silvicultural landscapes. Their relevance is based on the importance of human-altered environments on biodiversity conservation, as conservation units in real world (e.g., national parks and biological reserves) are insufficient to provide conservation for the integral biota. Notwithstanding, despite their plethora of environmental impacts, agricultural and silvicultural landscapes still contain a relevant part of the wildlife. Their qualified and quantified monitoring is necessary to the establishment of their conservation value, as well as their economic value in both local and international markets. This is the main problem this book aims to solve.
Contents
Part I - Conceptual innovations.
Chapter 1. Monitoring the complexity of biological processes (biocomplexity) instead of the diversity of biological patterns (biodiversity): The new wildlife management.
Chapter 2. Starting points in biodiversity governance: How far in the past is the Garden of Eden?.
Part II - Technological innovations I: indicators and sampling methodology.
Chapter 3. Estimating social species number of groups and population density based on vestiges in human-altered environments: The case study of collared peccaries.
Chapter 4. Sampling vestiges in trails: Adapting distance methods to inconspicuous animals.
Chapter 5. Sampling scats in trails: Trophic approach in wildlife surveys.
Chapter 6. Molecular techniques.
Chapter 7. Native vegetation biomass as a proxy for biodiversity I: Passerine birds.
Chapter 8. Native vegetation biomass as a proxy for biodiversity II: Small mammals.
Part III - Technological innovations II: Analytical methodology.
Chapter 9. An introduction to Bayesian hierarchical modelling applied to wildlife monitoring.
Chapter 10. Modelling zero-inflated and overdispersed count data.
Chapter 11. Distributional modelling applied to wildlife monitoring.
Chapter 12. Counting animals we can't see: The triple Poisson model for vestiges.
Chapter 13. Model adequacy vs. model selection.
Chapter 14. Bayesian dynamic models and automatic monitoring applied to wildlife monitoring.
Chapter 15. AI solutions for species identification.
Chapter 16. Optimal spatial sampling designs for scarce data.
Chapter 17. Mean-variance modelling of Neotropical passerine bird songs.
Chapter 18. Visualising sound: Using convolutional neural networks to identify bird species.
Part IV - Societal innovations: Case Studies.
Chapter 19. Impacts of rafting on the use of riparian forests by medium and large mammals.
Chapter 20. Rewilding agricultural landscapes.
Chapter 21. Long-term crossing spatial scales wildlife monitoring programmes: A proposal of a protocol for agricultural and silvicultural landscapes
Customer Reviews
Biography
Luciano M. Verdade is the Director of the Wildlife Management Consultancy (WMC). He holds a BSB in Agronomy and a MSc in Animal Sciences from the University of São Paulo in Brazil and a PhD in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida in the USA. He used to be an Associate Professor at the University of São Paulo, where he used to teach Population Ecology and Applied Evolutionary Ecology, and coordinated the group of founders of the undergraduate program in Biology and the graduate program in Applied Ecology. Luciano published more than 120 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals and nine technical books (three of them by Springer, including this one). Luciano worked in many international initiatives regarding research and education in wildlife management in anthropic environments, bioeconomy, and climate change. Besides his scientific career, Luciano is also a poet, with seven books of poetry published in Brazil and Portugal.
Prof. Rafael de Andrade Moral is a Professor of Statistics at Maynooth University, Ireland. He holds a BSc in Biology and an MSc and PhD in Statistics from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Rafael has a deep passion for teaching and carrying out research in statistical modelling applied to Ecology, Wildlife Management, Agriculture, and Environmental Science. He is the founder and director of the Theoretical and Statistical Ecology Group, which brings together a community of researchers who use mathematical and statistical tools to better understand the natural world. As an alternative teaching strategy, Rafael has been producing music videos and parodies to promote statistics on social media and in the classroom.
