Search

• Hare movement behaviour was studied before and after agricultural management events. • Hares spend more time on recently harvested crop fields, but not on mown grasslands. • Management events affect hare range sizes only in areas with large crop fields. • Hares shift their ranges away or towards fields depending on the management type. • Energy expenditure of hares is unaffected by agricultural management. Agricultural landscapes are spatially and temporally dynamic habitats that force wildlife to interact with different management practices, such as harvests and mowing events which cause sudden changes in resource availability. Animals may avoid agricultural management events and the changed habitat, to search for undisturbed areas or they might use and explore such areas due to beneficial changes in vegetation structure. Further, landscape structure might influence the movement processes that are underlying reactions to agricultural management. Here we study how agricultural management events affect animal movement behaviour in two contrastingly structured agricultural landscapes. In 2014 and 2015 we collared 36 European brown hares (Lepus europaeus) with GPS-tags and accelerometers in Northeast Germany (large agricultural fields) and South Germany (small fields and comparatively more non-arable vegetation). We recorded hares' movement behaviour for 4 days before and after agricultural management events without (e.g. fertilizer application) and with (harvest and mowing) immediate changes in resource availability, on the most common production cover types (wheat, grasslands, maize and rapeseed). We measured the number of GPS points in the focal fields, the range size (area covered within 4 days), the shift in range centre, and the hares' energy expenditure (overall dynamic body acceleration). More GPS locations were found on fields following management events that affected resource availability, and less GPS fixes were recorded on the wheat fields after management events without resource changes. Compared to an equivalent period without management events, hares showed increased range shifts after harvesting maize and rapeseed fields, mowing grasslands and after management events without resource changes for most of the production cover types. Range sizes were only affected in wheat fields in Northeast Germany, where they increased after harvest and decreased after management events without resource changes. Energy expenditure was unaffected by agricultural management. Hares may profit from harvested fields, likely because they find food in form of fallen grains, improve their predator detection probability and generally prefer areas with low vegetation. The reaction to management events without the change of resources might depend on the specific type of management practices (e.g. organic vs. inorganic fertilizer). Landscape structure may play an important role as range sizes increase due to the necessity to reach distant alternative habitats. Hence, the provision of smaller fields with high crop diversity and sufficient alternative habitat patches throughout the year has the potential to maximise accessible resources and predator detection ability for hares and other farmland wildlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the drivers underlying disease dynamics is still a major challenge in disease ecology, especially in the case of long-term disease persistence. Even though there is a strong consensus that density-dependent factors play an important role for the spread of diseases, the main drivers are still discussed and, more importantly, might differ between invasion and persistence periods. Here, we analysed long-term outbreak data of classical swine fever, an important disease in both wild boar and livestock, prevalent in the wild boar population from 1993 to 2000 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. We report outbreak characteristics and results from generalized linear mixed models to reveal what factors affected infection risk on both the landscape and the individual level. Spatiotemporal outbreak dynamics showed an initial wave-like spread with high incidence during the invasion period followed by a drop of incidence and an increase in seroprevalence during the persistence period. Velocity of spread increased with time during the first year of outbreak and decreased linearly afterwards, being on average 7.6 km per quarter. Landscape- and individual-level analyses of infection risk indicate contrasting seasonal patterns. During the persistence period, infection risk on the landscape level was highest during autumn and winter seasons, probably related to spatial behaviour such as increased long-distance movements and contacts induced by rutting and escaping movements. In contrast, individual-level infection risk peaked in spring, probably related to the concurrent birth season leading to higher densities, and was significantly higher in piglets than in reproductive animals. Our findings highlight that it is important to investigate both individual- and landscape-level patterns of infection risk to understand long-term persistence of wildlife diseases and to guide respective management actions. Furthermore, we highlight that exploring different temporal aggregation of the data helps to reveal important seasonal patterns, which might be masked otherwise., (© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Animal Ecology © 2019 British Ecological Society.)