approach may be a little different, but it is obvious that if we want effective conservation programs it is often necessary to integrate comportementals aspects in our studies. An example of which we are currently working. The creation of a marine protected area, and its long-term management, needs an accurate knowledge of conservation issues. In a context of over-wintering waders, high tide roosting sites of intertidal area are often better known that foraging sites, and are frequently used to spatially define protected areas for waders. For example, the national nature reserve of Saint-Brieuc Bay, located in the north of Brittany, is a site of international importance for wintering birds. The nature reserve (1,140ha) borders a sandy foreshore of 2,900ha. During the creation of the nature reserve, no behavioral studies have been done to know all the sites frequented by birds, and only the altars at high tide (known ornithologists) were protected. In 2010 and 2011 we conducted a study to track the behavior of groups of birds. We map the recharge areas that are mostly outside the nature reserve. The diversity and abundance of birds present in intertidal coastal ecosystems are closely related to the type, density and the accessibility of prey, and the sediment characteristics. The benthic macrofauna and sedimentary facies has been identified and mapped. A study of the spatial distribution of the six main species of waders depending on their activities has as well been realized. The current analysis is based on bio-sedimentary and spatial distribution of birds data-matching, and on the comparison of potential foraging habitats with habitats that are currently exploited by birds. This kind of approach allows managers to identify important areas for conservation of birds, to assess the impact of disturbance and management on effective use of potential habitats, and to improve the understanding of the benthic resources/birds/human activities system.

Of course it is not accurate behavioral study but it's a start!

I want to cite here another example where the behavioural ecology and conservation go hand in hand. In Arunachal Pradesh. India, the captive breeding of eastern hoolock gibbon (Hoolock leuconedys) has been a successful story and now the Central Zoo Authority of India is planning to introduce the species into a new habitat. In this regard, they are asking help from behaviourists working on gibbon in both captive and wild conditions. I think this is the best move initiated by the authority for better management of the species to ensure its survival in the new habitat. If happen so, that will be a best example of integration of behavioral ecology and conservation.

I'm not sure if I'm a conservation biologist or a behavioural ecologist, but I'm trying to walk the fine line between them! I think the easiest way to contribute is to understand how your current work could contribute to conservation, which involves communicating with those doing practical conservation work, or even conservation scientists working in universities. For example, for part of my PhD I used GIS tracks of human hunters to understand their movement ecology and devised a methodological framework for analysing this data. Although my work did not contribute to any current conservation projects, I presented it at a conservation conference and various smaller meetings, meaning that various conservation organisations have approached me and are interested in using the method to analyse their own data and understand human behaviour in areas they manage.

This isn't really a pure "behavioural ecology" example, but it's an example of the ways which behavioural research can (even unintentionally) contribute to conservation science.

Of course, for the wild population as to conserve a species we need to understand its ecology first so results of species ecosystem will feed on to species conservation planning.

A couple of examples from my group:

http://www.listenforwhales.org/

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/

There are also plenty of people in bioacoustics doing work with Night Flight Calls of birds in wind turbine sweep areas. For my PhD work, I'm mapping behavioral responses to noise fields, so that, too, has direct implications for conservation. I don't know if you'd call bioacoustics a form of behavioral ecology, but I would.

Indeed, despite books on the subject and various articles came out in the last 15 years, the marriage between Behavioural ecology and Conservation biology was never fully accomplished. The conceptual basis is there, and of course much information coming from behavioural ecology is indeed used to address conservation issues, but my feeling is that we first should attempt to truly integrate the fields of behavioural ecology and population dynamics and demography, trying to fully understand the impact of individual variation at the population level. When we will have a strong theoretical framework and case studies clearly showing these impacts and their relevance, the integration between behavioural ecology and conservation biology will come by itself. The new field of Evolutionary Demography is somehow going in this direction (see for example: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2656.2010.01734.x/abstract )

You would think a better understanding of behavior should help conservation. I believe in this respect ecologists of all stripes have done their homework. We have the diagnosis, we have (for the most part) the cure. Of course there will always be more to discover about wildlife (otherwise the research grant circus would collapse) but I would argue that we are experiencing diminishing returns from behavioral ecology research if its motivation is conservation. Conservation now is mostly a socioeconomic problem and thus if we really care about the environment (and not our publication score) what we need is not more behavioral ecology research but "humanities" on steroids, ie not people doing humanities because they failed maths but people with a sharp mind interested in what goes on in humans' brains and societal relationships in relation with the environment.

They already are.

In agreement with all answers in this thread, I believe behavioural ecology SHOULD be integral to animal conservation. And, to a large extent, it is, in the sense that most conservation biologists and wildlife managers have a solid knowledge of animal behaviour on the demographic, "large scale" level. But I think the real question, almost 20 years after the idea of "conservation behaviour" was coined, is why behavioural ecology -- on the scale that interests behavioural ecologists -- has not become integrated with conservation.

As behavioural ecologist, I'm interested in the development of behaviour, mating system, cognitive ecology, communication, behavioural endocrinology etc. etc. Instinctively -- to ME -- these issues seem important to conservation questions. I believe these two fields have so much in common that I am currently creating a graduate course in Conservation Behaviour, in the hopes that my students will then have a marketable, cross-disciplinary degree.

However, the question appears to always draw responses from behavioural ecologists, not conservation biologists (this thread is a great example). And that makes me think that we, as the behavioural ecologists, need to reach out to people engaged in hands-on conservation work. In both fields we have a lack of true knowledge of what is going on in the other field, and that can only be changed by face-to-face conversations, not by us continuously publishing in journals that we read. It's kind of preaching to the choir. As a novice conservation behaviourist (?) therefore, I am actively reaching out to managers and researchers outside my discipline, to get them excited about the possibilities that a merging of the fields can offer. It's a slow process, but I think the only one that can truly reap benefits. The suggestion by Sarah Papworth (see higher up) to give talks at conservation related conferences is a great example of how integration can begin.

I entirely agree with Aliza, and the necessity of reconciliation between conservation biology and behavioral ecology. I think if reconciliation can be done, especially in protected areas (parks, nature reserve ....). Indeed, beyond their role in biodiversity conservation, these sites are also "laboratories" in the service of national and international scientific research. They should contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the field of ecology and conservation biology, ecology behavior .... The scientific research in natural reserves and parks stem from the need to have a thorough knowledge the nature of its operations and to make appropriate decisions for management. In other words, protected areas can be a meeting ground between the various research topics, and the Scientific Council of the sites should reflect the diversity of these topics.

as a marine biologist - studying dolphins and whales - and a conservation ecologist - mapping critical underwater habitats. I have found a better understanding of dolphin behavior because of the habitat context - the two fields are intimately connected and the sooner we get that the better observations we will make - the better management decisions we will make, the better keepers of the environment we will be.

Yes, for example, reintroductions of species or captive breeding programs highly integrate the two fields and there are several examples of both failing because of a lack of understanding on the behavior or the species in question. However, I do think job opportunities that integrate both are rare, which I think is a contributing factor in behaviorists tending to go the academic route.

In freshwater conservation, we have so far a very poor track record of integrating behavioral ecological knowledge, thinking, and methods into conservation. For example, in Pacific salmon and native trout management in North America, governments have funded a fair amount of genetic research and hired geneticists to do it, and that work has shed important light on the fact that species introductions and artificial culture of fishes commonly cause genetic change that impairs survival and fitness in wild populations of native species. But when it comes to identifying and implementing management measures to limit or eliminate those harms, our track record is dismal, riddled with ineffective shots in the dark, because we have failed to appreciate that gene flow (among other biotic interactions) is mediated through behavior, and to a very large extent, it is those real time behaviors (not genes) that we must influence through management. But we know precious little about this and have only a tiny handful of behavioral ecologists that have ever done done supported research on the key questions.

To push this envelope further, I think conservation biology would be far more effective in identifying working solutions if we borrowed some knowledge and practice from the discipline of public health.

I might add that I don't think conservation biology is yet a "hard boiled" enough discipline to have its collective mind set against behavioral ecologists participating integrally in conservation science. (There may well be local pockets of resistance at some academic institutions, I'll grant that.) But I think there remains a severe bias in the kinds of research that most governments are willing to fund to inform conservation decisions and policies. Some of these biases reflect the disciplinary lineage of program directors, others reflect political interests or in some cases, social preferences or norms that mitigate against certain kinds of research but not others like molecular ecology that seem more technically removed from longstanding cultural beliefs.

Personally I've worked some across genetics, behavioral ecology, and population and ecosystem ecology. The stumbling blocks for my work have always been on the funding side. I've always had a ready supply of excellent and engaged graduate students to do the work, and no problems publishing this kind of spanning research if it's well-executed.

On the other hand I have had serious and recurring problems trying to publish across other longstanding, archaic, but strongly academically-enforced boundaries, such as those between aquatic and terrestrial ecology. (This remains a crucial gulf in conservation ecology, landscape ecology, reserve design, and conservation and land/water use practice. Shame on us for that.)

Maybe David Attenborough could best answer this question.

If behavioural ecology of plants and animals is not integrated with conservation, then conservation will be doomed. How can we conserve what we don't understand?

"Do you think that behavioural ecology and conservation will ever become truly integrated? "

into... what?

Attached is a PDF printout of the story about training quolls not to eat poisonous cane toads, which I provided above in a link to The Australian. Apparently this behaviour learned in the lab is being passed on from mother to offspring in the wild. Pretty amazing story connecting behavioural ecology and conservation!

For effective conservation of an organism it is important that we also understand their instincts and behavior, among other criteria. often our conservation strategies fail because of inadequate understanding of animal behavior. This discipline is of immense importance when reintroducing an animal to a new ecosystem or going for captive breeding. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to undertake behavioral studies on an organism to conserve it.

I would suggest you have a look to Blumstein Lab 's works and their "translational behavioral ecology"

https://www.eeb.ucla.edu/Faculty/Blumstein/

here is an interesting short communication, http://www.pnas.org/content/109/47/19043.full.pdf

Agreeing with Gerald Waneck. guess both field is incomplete without the other. if u do not understand organism how can you conserve it? and at the same time if we do not put in enough efforts in conserving then organism will be lost to study also. In India most of the time funding for behavioural studies is a major restriction whereas short term conservation work is promoted more.

Doesn’t Nature itself give the answer to this question? Only when all elements, biotic and abiotic, are integrated the ecosystem will function at its best. Same goes for research teams. You can’t be best at everything, you need multidisciplinary group. Sometimes you get data from molecular-genetic experiments that don’t make sense in strictly statistical way. But if you look at the biology, behavior and life strategy of investigated species, everything comes into place and makes sense. Conservation and management action that work great for some species would result in disastrous consequences when applied to some other species with totally different ecology.

So, only when we come together the Nature will benefit in full.

Hi Rebecca, excellent question, to which the short answer is they must. Conservation is doomed to fail without behavioral ecology, and behavioral ecology without conservation is either done by researchers who are arrogant or in denial of the state of the ecologies of their study subjects. If you want to read more as it pertains to primatology, please check out the article I've attached. Take care.

I totally agree with Aliza, that behavioral ecology should meet conservation practices and also about her sentence: "However, the question appears to always draw responses from behavioural ecologists, not conservation biologists (this thread is a great example). And that makes me think that we, as the behavioural ecologists, need to reach out to people engaged in hands-on conservation work."

See for me (I'm primarily a marine biologist but I try to integrate "genetics and evolution" into marine resources management), good conservation practices as well as good biological resources management should not be based on only one scientific domain but on several. Genetic is not more important than behavioral ecology nor that marine biology, they all complement each others.... In fishes for example, behavioral groups of the same species often exhibit different genetic characteristics or different biological traits which will make (even if they still interbred together) different management unit within the same population.

There's also an excellent textbook on the subject of integrating the two, which I read in a seminar on this exact subject while I was in graduate school. I provides some excellent examples of integrating the two (edited in part by Caro, of course): http://www.amazon.com/Behavioral-Ecology-Conservation-Biology-Caro/dp/0195104900

Behaviour is fully integrated into conservation biology, just as it always was in wildlife management since its origins in the 1940's. Those of us who define our work as being within the field of conservation or wildlife management conduct behavioural studies all the time. Topics like dispersal, migrtaion, habitat selection, social organisation are standard within both fields. The question is more about the degree to which academics (who might define themselves as behavioural ecologists or any one of many alternative labels) can overcome their biases and work with applied issues, switching theory drive research for problem driven research.

There are pragmatic reasons why animal behaviourists should become closely involved in conservation, and here are two. Urbanisation effects (increasing everywhere, and often to the good - consider wildlife in our cities) are often behavioural responses (and by urbanisation, I mean the adoption of urban habitats by wild animal species, or the development of a dependence on the urban habitat). Consider baboons on the Cape Peninsula, or hyaenas in he Kruger National Park. To understand the effect of urbanisation in conservation we need to understand behaviour. And then, in general, much of species' response to habitat change (including to the emergence of novel ecosystems) needs to be understood in terms of behaviour.

As an animal behaviourist (doctorate in Polecat behaviour) I have been involved with hands-on hedgehog conservation in the UK for the past 23 years. I have run York Hedgehog Rescue centre singlehandedly during this time. The data collected have been invaluable in establishing survival rates, post-release, litter sizes, habitats where individuals are found, the hazards currently facing hedgehogs both in the countryside and in towns etc. I am currently looking at hibernation data and continuing to monitor a hedgehog population within the walls of York using Reconyx remote cameras (into year 4). I find that adopting a hands-on approach, in terms of rehabilitating sick and injured hedgehogs, has been second to none in helping to understand the reasons for the rapid decline in populations in the UK in recent years. Re the original question: in my case the answer is a definite 'yes'.

If you want to predict the future, you need to know underlying mechanisms. If you want to predict efficiency in conservation strategies you need to know the underlying mechanisms, including behavioral aspects. The complicated thing is that every organism-environment interaction may express unique characteristics complicating generalisation from case studies. Background knowledge concerning local organism-environment interactions with unique characteristics is probably more important than the content of whole libraries dealing with other organism-environment interactions.

I think the 'divide' between these two disciplines is possibly just one of scale? Conservation planners tend to focus on conserving as broad a suite of species as possible, while behavioural studies tend to be largely focussed on one or two species within the same system. Linking broad-scale conservation plans to animal behaviour can thus be difficult, unless one starts using frameworks such as umbrella species, which remain somewhat controversial, to say the least. Conservation planning aside, I would imagine that behavioural ecologists could make a greater contribution to the conservation literature by doing more work outside of protected areas where human influences are likely to be greater, and investigating how animal behaviour changes in response to factors like habitat change, the availability of easily-accessible, high-quality food and persecution. Improved knowledge if animal behaviour in such areas could in turn influence conservation management.

If so-called nature conservation protection areas would represent only ca. 8% of the global surface, and conservation biologists would only focus on these protected areas (e.g. nature reserves or wildlife parks) there is a significant (unscientific) bias in what should be protected and there will be a big problem for what will happen in the >90% so-called unprotected areas. If we should not take care for the environments where humans live (that is outside nature reserves), there is a problem!

Behavioural ecologists not only work on more than one or two model species in comparative analyses, but also often work in so-called unprotected areas, which is illustrated in studies that focus on biological consequences of urbanisation or studies that focus on standardised (laboratory) environments.

And I repeat the simple message like a great tit:

'If you want to predict efficiency in conservation strategies you need to know fundamental underlying mechanisms, including behavioral aspects. The complicated thing is that every organism-environment interaction may express unique characteristics only applicable to local conditions.'

Example:

If you get an exciting ideas when you read about species/system A, this does not imply that the exciting idea is applicable in species/system B. In many cases, the idea is completely irrelevant, but exciting enough to get financial support. This may often happen when people start to work on systems they don't know and also when people are financed by others that do not truly know what they are financing.

Alas, my experience is that funding institutions of conservation-related research (government or private) only occasionally understand or materially care about what science they are paying for, and even less often remember it by the time the project results are due. Funding is directly political; science is indirectly so. Gaining scientific understanding is a more or less a trick we manage to perform in course of the process.

Apologies for glibness.

Dear Christopher,

This implies that to get funded 'marketing strategies' become more important than science quality per se, whatever the science topic addressed. This is unacceptable from a fundamental science point of view.

Is science aimed to let decision-makers dream about how the world might run?

Marcel: Yeah, good question. Scientific ideals and political ideals don't run in perfect tandem, to say the least. I've spent a good deal of my career reminding decision-makers that the science we already have in hand makes it plain the world doesn't (biophysically) work the way they wish it does. And I have spent another good chunk of time on review panels reminding funders they are trying to fund research that has already been done, or is demonstrably irrelevant to the crucial decisions they have to make. Of course often they don't want to hear this--it's politically disruptive. As it works out, those scientists who are less inclined to level with funders up front about what is already known to science--that is, to let the political bubble float a while-- are more likely to get funded. Yes, that is bad for science, and generally for conservation.

When it comes to applied research in conservation, funders are most often buying time or hoping they'll gain some flexibility. Science done right always takes time, but doesn't necessarily provide managers greater discretion or flexibility--sometimes it does, but as often or more often it has the opposite outcome.

Perhaps politics more frequently aligns with science in Europe, but certainly in North America, that only happens by fits and starts. And too often, by litigation.

But we're straying from the topic thread.