Anthropogenic sounds influence animal vocal behaviour, species distributions, and community assemblages. Natural sounds also have the potential to affect the behaviour and ecology of animals, but it is currently unknown if the effects of natural sounds match those of anthropogenic sounds. Here, we quantified and compared the effects of natural and anthropogenic sounds on avian song performance by calculating trade-off frontiers based on trill rate and bandwidth of 2 emberizid species. Chipping sparrows (Spizella passerina)...

Apex predators may influence carnivore communities through the suppression of competitively dominant mesopredators, however they also provide carrion subsidies that could influence foraging and competition among sympatric mesopredators when small prey is scarce. We assessed coyote Canis latrans and red fox Vulpes vulpes winter diet overlap and composition from scats collected in two study areas with >3-fold difference in grey wolf Canis lupus density due to a wolf control program. We hypothesized that differences in...

1.Assessing habitat quality is a primary goal of ecologists. However, evaluating habitat features that relate strongly to habitat quality at fine-scale resolutions across broad-scale extents is challenging. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) provide an avenue for bridging the gap between relatively high spatial resolution, low spatial extent field-based habitat quality measurements and lower spatial resolution, higher spatial extent satellite-based remote sensing. Our goal in this study was to evaluate the potential for UAS structure from motion...

Understanding behavioral responses of animals to the thermal environment is of increasing importance under changing climate regimes. Thermoregulatory behaviors, such as exploitation of thermal refugia or temporal partitioning of activity, can buffer organisms against hot and cold thermal extremes but may conflict with other life history needs. Our objective was to evaluate strategies for behavioral thermoregulation by a small-bodied endotherm to test hypotheses about tradeoffs between thermal and security needs across seasons. We quantified the...