Landscapes of fear: from trophic cascades to applied management and population ecology
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Conservation Biology, Ecology
- Keywords
- Animal Behavior, Habitat Selection, Yellowstone, Giving-up density (GUD), Spatial Ecology, Evolutionary dynamics, Food-Webs, Mechanisms of coexistence, Conservation, Wildlife management
- Copyright
- © 2017 Bleicher
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Landscapes of fear: from trophic cascades to applied management and population ecology. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2840v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2840v1
Abstract
Predator-Prey dynamics, and their trophic impacts, have functioned as a focal point in both community and population biology for five decades. The work-group focusing on these dynamics has however largely changed the focus of their work from trophic effects to the study of non-consumptive effects of predation-- the “ecology of fear”. An increasing number of studies chose to spatially chart wildlife populations’ risk assessment and of those the majority use optimal patch-use (giving-up densities) as a continuous measure of fear. These charts, “landscapes-of-fear” (LOFs) originated in conservation literature and the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. Today, they are used to study population habitat selection and venture into the evolutionary context with studies examining the mechanisms by which species coexist in the same physical space. This review predicts increase in, and encourages the use of, LOFs: as a conservation tool to assess species land-use; as a bridge between ecology and neurology with stress hormones as indicators fear; and as a tool to compare species’ evolutionary dynamics within a community context.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.