Wildlife Research and Conservation 2023

Marlène Gamelon is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in the Biometry and Evolutionary Biology Lab (LBBE) in Lyon, France and at the Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics at the University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. She is a population ecologist interested in understanding how free-ranging animal populations respond to environmental changes. Her research primarily relies on individual long-term monitoring of natural populations, with implications in conservation and management.

Affiliation: Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Lyon, France & Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Plenary talk: Can natural populations be resilient to environmental changes and harvesting?

Natural populations live in an environment that is rapidly changing. Alongside the changes in mean values, temporal variation in temperature, precipitation, etc. also increases, leading to more frequent occurrences of extreme weather events. Understanding species’ abilities to cope with this increasing environmental variation is crucial in the current context of global changes. Demographic buffering can allow populations to persist in a changing environment by reducing the effects of environmental variation on the long-run growth rate. I will present a review of empirical studies that tested this hypothesis, shedding lights on how and when species may persist in an increasingly variable environment. In addition to environmental changes, exploited populations are affected by harvest, with removal of individuals through fishing and hunting. I will discuss to what extent harvesting and environmental changes can interact with each other (the so called “harvest-interaction hypothesis”) and how harvesting can amplify environmentally-induced population fluctuations and increase extinction risk. From a long-term monitoring of an ungulate population that is harvested and influenced by extreme weather events, I will then provide an empirical test of this hypothesis and will discuss the implications according to species’ life history strategy and harvesting strategy.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Theresa Götz studied Physics at the University of Regensburg and did a PhD in Physics at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Afterwards she did a second PhD in information science at the University of Regensburg. Both theses were in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. She is working as a chief scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen. Since 2022 she is professor at the Technical University of Applied Sciences in Amberg-Weiden.

Affiliation: Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule Amberg-Weiden, Germany

Plenary talk: How can the technology behind ChatGpt help protect the environment?

Transformer neural networks - the technology behind ChatGPT - are one of the most impressive advances in artificial intelligence. These networks represent a new approach to processing time-dependent data and have experienced rapid development in recent years. The impressive advances in the use of transformer neural networks have the potential to revolutionize a wide range of applications in different fields as well as in environmental protection.

Unlike traditional sequence-to-sequence methods, Transformer Neural Networks do not use RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) or LSTM (Long-Term-Short-Term Memory), thereby abandoning the concept of sequence, making them particularly powerful. Instead, they use an attention mechanism to determine the relationships between parts of a data set and capture the context. This enables them to solve difficult tasks such as machine translation, summaries, text generation, similarity detection and much more.

In this lecture, the basic concept behind ChatGPT will be explained and then various examples from the field of wildlife research and conservation will be presented.

Mirte Bosse is assistant professor in conservation genomics at VU Amsterdam and Wageningen University. She is fascinated by the story about our history that is written in our DNA. Reading the genome as a history book reveals a wealth of information about the past – but also holds promises for the future. She build her expertise in population and conservation genomics in wildlife and livestock. Her work focuses on use of genome sequences to obtain insight into the history and potential future of populations. She is particular interested in understanding how demographic fluctuations, hybridization and selection shape patterns of genetic diversity along the genome, and how we can use sequence-derived information to facilitate conservation management.  Mirte's genomics work had led to refined sequence-derived measures of genetic health and diversity in numerous livestock populations, particularly in chicken and pigs. Building upon this expertise, she now extends her efforts to the conservation of endangered species such as warty pigs, Asian elephants, and red pandas. By leveraging sequence-derived information, she strives to safeguard these fragile species and ensure their survival for future generations.

Affiliation: Wageningen University & Research - Animal Breeding and Genomics, The Netherlands

Plenary talk: Decoding the past to safeguard the future

Zoo populations can form a valuable reservoir for threatened species for preservation and potential reintroduction. Therefore, captive populations need to be sustainable and zoo populations of threatened species need to be managed such that genetic diversity is maintained, inbreeding minimized, and hybridization avoided. Typically, captive population sizes are small, with generally only a few individuals per zoo which may pose several risks to the genetic integrity of the population, such as lower genetic diversity and increased inbreeding rates. Likewise, ex situ populations are generally made up of a small number of founders, thus increasing the risk of deleterious alleles becoming expressed, leading to inbreeding depression. Additionally, ex situ populations may have diverged from the original wild population due to random genetic drift and inbreeding, hybridisation, artificial selection, and they may have adapted to the captive environment. Novel genomic technologies have proven value to evaluate population sustainability and reintroduction potential in EEP programmes. The DNA sequence can provide important information about unknown relatedness, inbreeding and harmful mutations when lineage-specific malformations seem to pop up in the population, but also predict what will happen to genetic viability in the future. Besides these practical issues, full genomes enable us to dive further into the evolutionary history of these species that is written in their genome sequence. Unraveling wild population structure, evolutionary history and local adaptation ensures that when EEP animals contribute to in-situ populations their fit to local genetic diversity is optimized. This plenary highlights how expanding the genomics toolbox for endangered species supports the coordination of EEP programmes.

José A. Godoy is a molecular ecologist and conservation geneticist applying genomic data and tools to understand the genomic and fitness consequences of species decline and fragmentation, and to support species conservation through genetic monitoring and management. He is a researcher at Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD-CSIC), Sevilla, Spain, a scientific advisor of the Spanish Ministry of Environment for the Iberian lynx and the Iberian imperial eagle, and a member of Conservation Genetics Specialists Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (CGSG-IUCN).

Affiliation: Estación Biológica de Doñana, CSIC, Spain

Plenary talk: The role of genomics in the conservation success story of the iconic Iberian lynx

The Iberian lynx was at the brink of extinction by the end of the 20^th century, but is now steadily recovering, providing an amazing conservation success story. Such a spectacular recovery has been possible thanks to a sustained funding by successive LIFE projects, and the successful implementation of both in situ and ex situ programs, which are culminating with an ambitious reintroduction program. Our work with genetic markers and whole genome data suggests that genetic factors contributed to the decline and hampered early conservation efforts, and that their proper management is now contributing to the recovery. The species is one of the least genetically diverse, and ancient and historical data suggest this is the result of a combination of small long-term effective sizes, historical bottlenecks, and the fragmentation and local extirpation occurring during the last century. Negative effects of inbreeding and low genetic diversity include reduced reproduction and survival, and several genetic disorders have reached moderate frequencies, including an idiopathic juvenile epilepsy. Genomic data provide evidence for the accumulation of moderately deleterious variation as a short-term effect of bottlenecks, and also for the long-term purging of highly deleterious variation. Genetic management has included the mixing of the two genetically differentiated remnant populations, both in captivity and through translocations. This has resulted in the genetic rescue of the highly inbred Doñana population, driven mostly by a single highly-successful translocated male and mediated by a higher reproductive success of admixed individuals. The captive breeding program has succeeded in capturing and preserving extant genetic variation and is providing 30-40 animals per year for reintroductions since 2015, and released captive-born individuals are showing high survival and successful reproduction in the wild. The latest LIFE project “Lynxconnect” is implementing an intensive non-invasive genetic monitoring program to serve as the basis for an extensive genetic management integrating remnant, captive and reintroduced populations. The intensively monitored and managed Iberian lynx, together with the available genomic resources, provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the genomic basis of inbreeding depression and genetic rescue, and to further extend the contribution of genomics to species conservation through the management of genetic disorders.

Dr. Jenny Anne Glikman holds a PhD in Human Geography and is a Ramon y Cajal Fellow at the Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC). Her line of research focuses on the social aspects of human relationships with nature and wildlife to address conflicts that threaten biodiversity conservation and human activities. The aim is to develop shared solutions and conservation actions to improve human-wildlife coexistence. Since 2017 she is a member of the steering committee of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN): the "Human Bear Conflict Expert Teams" and the "Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence Specialist Group".

Affiliation: Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC), Spain

Plenary talk: Human-wildlife interactions: conflict and coexistence

In general, the relationship between humans and wildlife is described in terms of conflict or coexistence. While there have been a remarkable number of studies that focus on human-wildlife conflict, only the last decade has witnessed an increase in the scientific literature at neutral or positive interactions between human and wildlife.

The inclusion of terms such as coexistence helps to recognize that human beings are an integral part of nature, and that nature, and that wildlife can thrive in a shared environment where conflicts are minimal and/or well managed. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that humans are part of the conflict, but also part of the solution.

In this talk I will present several case studies exploring the perspectives of different actors who share territory with predators such as jaguars, leopards and bears. Specifically, I will focus on what processes are involved in the interactions between humans and wildlife to move toward favorable conditions for both.

Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her research expertise includes critical animal law, vegan ecofeminist theory, and postcolonial theory. She has held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University and currently serves as Director of the Animals & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria. She serves on advisory bodies relating to sociolegal studies, animal law, and feminist theory including at Social & Legal Studies and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law. Her manuscript entitled Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021 and her open access documentary designed for high school and undergraduate screening, A Deeper Kindness: Youth Activism in Animal Law, launched in October 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg6QcF9rWk0&t=46s). Her current monograph project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines the lack of government regulation in favour of farmed animals as a rule of law violation and thus a matter of constitutional import. Professor Deckha is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Columbia Law School.

Affiliation: University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Plenary talk: Assisted reproduction to avoid species extinction: when is it ethical for individual animals?

This plenary talk will discuss leading animal ethics approaches to ending human exploitation and domination of animals to consider the ethical guidance each approach offers in determining if and how humans should facilitate animal reproduction for the purpose of conservation and extinction avoidance. Professor Deckha will argue that an ecofeminist/feminist animal care approach to the question is the most compelling as it centres the needs and agency of female animals who will be most impacted by assisted reproductive efforts humans undertake.