International consensus principles for ethical wildlife control.

Human-wildlife conflicts are commonly addressed by excluding, relocating, or lethally controlling animals with the goal of preserving public health and safety, protecting property, or conserving other valued wildlife. However, declining wildlife populations, a lack of efficacy of control methods in achieving desired outcomes, and changes in how people value animals have triggered widespread acknowledgment of the need for ethical and evidence-based approaches to managing such conflicts. We explored international perspectives on and experiences with human-wildlife conflicts to develop principles for ethical wildlife control. A diverse panel of 20 experts convened at a 2-day workshop and developed the principles through a facilitated engagement process and discussion. They determined that efforts to control wildlife should begin wherever possible by altering the human practices that cause human-wildlife conflict and by developing a culture of coexistence; be justified by evidence that significant harms are being caused to people, property, livelihoods, ecosystems, and/or other animals; have measurable outcome-based objectives that are clear, achievable, monitored, and adaptive; predictably minimize animal welfare harms to the fewest number of animals; be informed by community values as well as scientific, technical, and practical information; be integrated into plans for systematic long-term management; and be based on the specifics of the situation rather than negative labels (pest, overabundant) applied to the target species. We recommend that these principles guide development of international, national, and local standards and control decisions and implementation.

Small Water Bodies in Great Britain and Ireland: Ecosystem function, human-generated degradation, and options for restorative action.

Small, 1st and 2nd-order, headwater streams and ponds play essential roles in providing natural flood control, trapping sediments and contaminants, retaining nutrients, and maintaining biological diversity, which extend into downstream reaches, lakes and estuaries. However, the large geographic extent and high connectivity of these small water bodies with the surrounding terrestrial ecosystem makes them particularly vulnerable to growing land-use pressures and environmental change. The greatest pressure on the physical processes in these waters has been their extension and modification for agricultural and forestry drainage, resulting in highly modified discharge and temperature regimes that have implications for flood and drought control further downstream. The extensive length of the small stream network exposes rivers to a wide range of inputs, including nutrients, pesticides, heavy metals, sediment and emerging contaminants. Small water bodies have also been affected by invasions of non-native species, which along with the physical and chemical pressures, have affected most groups of organisms with consequent implications for the wider biodiversity within the catchment. Reducing the impacts and restoring the natural ecosystem function of these water bodies requires a three-tiered approach based on: restoration of channel hydromorphological dynamics; restoration and management of the riparian zone; and management of activities in the wider catchment that have both point-source and diffuse impacts. Such activities are expensive and so emphasis must be placed on integrated programmes that provide multiple benefits. Practical options need to be promoted through legislative regulation, financial incentives, markets for resource services and voluntary codes and actions.

Excess baggage for birds: inappropriate placement of tags on gannets changes flight patterns.

Devices attached to flying birds can hugely enhance our understanding of their behavioural ecology for periods when they cannot be observed directly. For this, scientists routinely attach units to either birds' backs or their tails. However, inappropriate payload distribution is critical in aircraft and, since birds and planes are subject to the same laws of physics during flight, we considered aircraft aerodynamic constraints to explain flight patterns displayed by northern gannets Sula bassana equipped with (small ca. 14 g) tail- and back-mounted accelerometers and (larger ca. 30 g) tail-mounted GPS units. Tail-mounted GPS-fitted birds showed significantly higher cumulative numbers of flap-glide cycles and a higher pitch angle of the tail than accelerometer-equipped birds, indicating problems with balancing inappropriately placed weights with knock-on consequences relating to energy expenditure. These problems can be addressed by carefully choosing where to place tags on birds according to the mass of the tags and the lifestyle of the subject species.