Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Wildlife ecology and conservation examines how animals move through, select, and share landscapes, how populations grow or decline, and how species at different levels of the food web shape one another through predation and competition. Understanding these dynamics has become urgent as habitat loss, climate shifts, and direct conflict with humans drive biodiversity loss at rates that outpace our ability to measure it—tools like camera trapping and occupancy modeling now let researchers track elusive species across vast areas with unprecedented precision. Active questions center on how predation risk propagates through ecosystems via trophic cascades, altering prey behavior and vegetation in ways that ripple far beyond the predator-prey pair, and on how human pressure reshapes animal movement and habitat selection in real time. Translating these ecological findings into effective conservation management—deciding where to intervene, what to protect, and how to reduce human-wildlife conflict—remains one of the field's most contested and consequential challenges.

Works

166,758

Total citations

2,933,903

Keywords

Occupancy RatesAnimal MovementTrophic CascadesHabitat SelectionPopulation DynamicsHuman-Wildlife Conflict