Matthew Low

Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences | SLU · Department of Ecology

Insects generally have high reproductive rates leading to rapid population growth and high local densities; ideal conditions for disease epidemics. The parasites and diseases that naturally regulate wild insect populations can also impact when these insects are produced commercially, on farms. While insects produced for human or animal consumption...

The cold and arid mountains and plateaus of High Asia, inhabited by a relatively sparse human population, a high density of livestock, and wildlife such as the iconic snow leopard Panthera uncia, are usually considered low risk for disease outbreaks. However, based on current knowledge about drivers of disease emergence, we show that High Asia is r...

Variation in the diagnostic interpretation of radiographs is a well-recognised problem in human and veterinary medicine. One common solution is to create a ‘consensus’ score based on a majority or unanimous decision from multiple observers. While consensus approaches are generally assumed to improve diagnostic repeatability, the extent to which con...

Animals interpret their environment by combining information from multiple senses. The relative usefulness of different senses may vary between species, habitats and sexes; yet, how multimodal stimuli are integrated and prioritized is unknown for most taxa. We experimentally assessed foraging preferences of great tits (Parus major) to test whether...

Quantification of plant biomass and carbon in ecosystems is critical for climate change mitigation. For large trees in various ecosystems, allometric models for estimating biomass have been developed but few biomass equations exist for small trees and shrubby vegetation. Allometric above-ground biomass (AGB) models are needed for small trees and sh...

Current environmental changes may increase temporal variability of life history traits of species thus affecting their long‐term population growth rate and extinction risk. If there is a general relationship between environmental variances (EVs) and mean annual survival rates of species, that relationship could be used as a guideline for analyses o...

Soil seed banks are an important component of plant population and community dynamics. As a functional strategy that has evolved in response to abiotic disturbance regimes, they are likely to play a key role in determining biodiversity responses to global change. However, like all aspects of biodiversity, patterns in soil seed banks are likely to b...

The alpine ecosystems and communities of central Asia are currently undergoing large-scale ecological and socio-ecological changes likely to affect wildlife-livestock-human disease interactions and zoonosis transmission risk. However, relatively little is known about the prevalence of pathogens in this region. Between 2012 and 2015 we screened 142...

Knowledge about the number of reproductive females is important for monitoring population dynamics, and can be critical for managing human–wildlife conflicts. For wolverines Gulo gulo, counts of reproductive females is the basis for estimates of population size in Scandinavia, as well as a key measure for compensation payments to Sámi reindeer‐herd...

The daily and seasonal activity patterns of snow leopards (Panthera uncia) are poorly understood, limiting our ecological understanding and hampering our ability to mitigate threats such as climate change and retaliatory killing in response to livestock predation. We fitted GPS-collars with activity loggers to snow leopards, Siberian ibex (Capra si...

Conservation management is often integrated into a broader tourism context, and under some conditions allows wildlife trophy hunting to support its goals. In such cases it is generally acknowledged that the direct impact of hunting requires careful monitoring and regulation with respect to the size and dynamics of hunted populations. However, hunti...

Asian woollyneck (Ciconia episcopus) is a large wading bird species whose conservation status has been recently down-listed, despite a lack of concrete information on its nesting ecology and breeding success. In this study, we report its breeding success and nest habitat suitability in Nepal from 39 nesting sites (2016-2020). Simal (Bombax ceiba) (...

Disease-induced personality change results from endogenous and adaptive host responses or parasitic manipulation. Within animal husbandry systems understanding the connection between behaviour and disease is important for health monitoring and for designing systems considerate to animal welfare. However, understanding these relationships within ins...

Current levels of forestry expansion in boreal forests threaten to radically reduce biodiversity. For many forest-dwelling species the threat is not simply because the forest is used for biomass production, but rather how it is used. Retention forestry practices aim to limit impacts on biodiversity during the final felling stage of a forestry cycle...

In this response to Hertzog et al. 2022, we clarify the three issues raised and develop an important aspect of the original study.

Vultures are ecologically important primarily because of their scavenging role in cleaning carcasses of the environment. Because of anthropogenic impacts, the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) has suffered catastrophic declines in parts of its range and, thus, information about its global distribution and factors influencing its occurrence w...

The central tenet of European farmland ecology is that agricultural intensification during the 20th century was largely responsible for dramatic declines in species abundances. However, during this time, human rural settlements were also undergoing radical changes through modernization, with undocumented biodiversity impacts in this important wildl...

Greatly simplified ecosystems are often neglected for biodiversity studies. However, these simplified systems dominate in many regions of the world, and a lack of understanding of what shapes species occurrence in these systems can have consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem services at a massive scale. In Fennoscandia, ~90% of the boreal fore...

The Asian Woollyneck Ciconia episcopus is a stork found throughout Asia whose international conservation status is currently being considered for reclassification from vulnerable to near-threatened. However, much of what is known about this species is fragmented across observational reports and small studies making a comprehensive assessment of pop...

Estimating the contribution of demographic parameters to changes in population growth is essential for understanding why populations fluctuate. Integrated population models (IPMs) offer a possibility to estimate the contributions of additional demographic parameters, for which no data have been explicitly collected—typically immigration. Such param...

The ectoparasitic mite, Varroa destructor, is unarguably the leading cause of honeybee (Apis mellifera) mortality worldwide through its role as a vector for lethal viruses, in particular, strains of the Deformed wing virus (DWV) and Acute bee paralysis virus (ABPV) complexes. Several honeybee populations across Europe have well-documented adaptatio...

Background: Asian Woollyneck Ciconia episcopus is large wading bird whose conservation status has been recently down-listed, despite a lack of general knowledge on its nesting ecology and breeding success. Thus, in this study we conducted the most comprehensive survey on the nesting ecology of this species to date. Methods: We located 39 nesting si...

Background Morphological differentiation between populations resulting from local adaptations to environmental conditions is likely to be more pronounced in populations with increasing genetic isolation. In a previous study a positive clinal variation in body size was observed in isolated Roesel’s bush-cricket, Metrioptera roeselii , populations, b...

Morphological differentiation between populations resulting from local adaptions to environmental conditions is likely to be more pronounced in populations with increasing genetic isolation.

Significant knowledge gaps persist on snow leopard demography and reproductive behavior. From a GPS-collared population in Mongolia, we estimated the timing of mating, parturition and independence. Based on three mother-cub pairs, we describe the separation phase of the cub from its mother as it gains independence. Snow leopards mated from January-...

Forestry in the boreal region increasingly replaces natural disturbances in shaping biodiversity. Large-scale removal of small diameter trees (thinning), is ubiquitous in northern European forestry, yet an understanding of how it relates to biodiversity across taxa is lacking. To address this, we examined how two forest structural elements, commonl...

Assessing the source–sink status of populations and habitats is of major importance for understanding population dynamics and for the management of natural populations. Sources produce a net surplus of individuals (per capita contribution to the metapopulation > 1) and will be the main contributors for self‐sustaining populations, whereas sinks pro...

The Great Barrier Reef is an iconic ecosystem, known globally for its rich marine biodiversity that includes many thousands of tropical breeding seabirds. Despite indications of localized declines in some seabird species from as early as the mid‐1990s, trends in seabird populations across the reef have never been quantified. With a long history of...

The delivery of rigorous and unbiased evidence on the effects of interventions lay at the heart of the scientific method. Here we examine scientific papers evaluating agri‐environment schemes, the principal instrument to mitigate farmland biodiversity declines worldwide. Despite previous warnings about rudimentary study designs in this field, we fo...

Resource dispersion or kin selection are commonly used to explain animal spatial and social organization. Despite this, studies examining how these factors interact in wild populations of solitary animals are rare. We used 16 years of individual-level spatial and genetic data to disentangle how resources and relatedness influence spatial orga- niza...

Reliable assessments of animal abundance are key for successful conservation of endangered species. For elusive animals with individually-unique markings, camera-trap surveys are a benchmark standard for estimating local and global population abundance. Central to the reliability of resulting abundance estimates is the assumption that individuals a...

Leopard (Panthera pardus) predation on domestic animals is often associated with human-leopard conflict. We investigated leopard pre-dation patterns of domestic animals using a semi-structured questionnaire. We quantified domestic animal losses in randomly selected households (n = 62) and households with previously reported leopard predation (n = 3...

Feline hip dysplasia (FHD) is a debilitating condition affecting the hip joints of millions of domestic cats worldwide. Despite this, little is known about FHD except that it is relatively common in the large breed Maine Coon. We used 20 years of data from 5038 pedigree-registered Maine Coon cats in a radiographic health screening programme for FHD...

Abstract Climate change is profoundly affecting the phenology of many species. In migratory birds, there is evidence for advances in their arrival time at the breeding ground and their timing of breeding, yet empirical studies examining the interdependence between arrival and breeding time are lacking. Hence, evidence is scarce regarding how breedi...

Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus) play an important ecological role in central Asia, but conservation planning is hindered because basic information about their habitat requirements is lacking. We used 66 observations of roosting vultures to identify factors related to their presence, and MaxEnt model to predict areas of suitable roosting s...

The bacterial disease American Foulbrood (AFB), caused by the Gram-positive bacterium Paenibacillus larvae, is considered the most contagious and destructive infectious disease affecting honeybees world-wide. The resilient nature of P. larvae bacterial spores presents a difficult problem for the control of AFB. Burning clinically symptomatic coloni...

Land use is likely to be a key driver of population dynamics of species inhabiting an-thropogenic landscapes, such as farmlands. Understanding the relationships between land use and variation in population growth rates is therefore critical for the management of many farmland species. Using 24 years of data of a declining farmland bird in an integr...

The emerging insects-as-food industry is increasingly promoted as a sustain- able alternative to other animal protein production systems. However, the exact nature of its environmental benefits are uncertain because of the overwhelming lack of knowledge concerning almost every aspect of production: from suitable species, their housing and feed requ...

Foraging strategies of birds can influence trophic plant-insect networks with impacts on primary plant production. Recent experiments show that some forest insectivorous birds can use herbivore induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) to locate herbivore-infested trees, but it is unclear how birds combine or prioritise visual and olfactory information when...

The European house cricket (Acheta domesticus) is a species of interest for the emerging insect-as-food industry.Acheta domesticusdensovirus (AdDV) is a member of the Parvoviridae virus family which infectsA. domesticus,causing widespread mortality and even extinction of local cricket populations. Despite the well-known detri-mental effects of AdDV...

As wild harvesting of insects gives way to mass rearing, there is an urgent need to develop expertise and methods in insect animal husbandry and facility design. In order to advance the science of animal husbandry and production in this field, comparisons and contrasts of different insect rearing facilities currently in production are likely to be...

Territory size is often larger for males than for females in species without biparental care. For large solitary carnivores, this is explained by males encompassing a set of female territories to monopolize their reproduction during mating (area maximization). However, males are expected to behave more like females outside of breeding, with their a...

Insect production has been suggested as a food production system that could be more sustainable than many conventional livestock systems. Insects are a promising source of nutrients for humans containing high amounts of good quality protein, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals. A sustainable insect industry could have large impacts on land use, ecol...

Willow (Salix spp.) short rotation coppice is commercially grown to produce lignocellulosic biomass to meet renewable bioenergy demands. Most commercial willow coppices are grown in stands of a single genotype, but biomass productivity may be greater in mixed communities, and the productivity in mixed communities may depend on the specific genotype...

Bayesian methods and frequentist confidence intervals are proposed as an alternative approach in ecotoxicology emphasizing effect sizes and associated (un)certainties to judge the biological relevance of effects instead of basing decisions on p-values. These approaches show advantages over null hypothesis significance testing. In particular, Bayesi...

The seasonal timing of reproduction is a major fitness factor in many organisms. Commonly, individual fitness declines with time in the breeding season. We investigated three suggested but rarely tested hypotheses for this seasonal fitness decline: (1) time per se (date hypothesis), (2) late breeders are of lower quality than early ones (individual...

Group formation reduces individual predation risk when the proportion of prey taken per predator encounter declines faster than the increase in group encounter rate (attack-abatement). Despite attack-abatement being an important component of group formation ecology, several key aspects have not been empirically studied, that is, interactions with t...

The influence of climate change on the fitness of wild populations is often studied in the context of the spring onset of the reproductive season. This focus is relevant for climate influences on reproductive success, but neglects other fitness-relevant periods (e.g., autumn preparation for overwintering). We examined variation in climate variables...

Background Mosquito habitat-association studies are an important basis for disease control programmes and/or vector distribution models. However, studies do not explicitly account for incomplete detection during larval presence and abundance surveys, with potential for significant biases because of environmental influences on larval behaviour and s...

Appendix S1. The use of yearly roe deer hunting bags as proxy for roe deer density. Figure S1. Proportion of 90% isopleth area included in the 50% isopleth for male in relation to prey density index. Table S1. Model selection relating lynx annual home range size to (a) the interaction between country and prey density index and (b) the interaction...

Home range (HR) size variation is often linked to resource abundance, with sex differences expected to relate to sex-specific fitness consequences. However, studies generally fail to disentangle the effects of the two main drivers of HR size variation, food and conspecific density, and rarely consider how their relative influence change over spatio...

The recent trend for journals to require open access to primary data included in publications has been embraced by many biologists, but has caused apprehension amongst researchers engaged in long-term ecological and evolutionary studies. A worldwide survey of 73 principal investigators (Pls) with long-term studies revealed positive attitudes toward...

Although the effects of individual age, resource availability and reproductive costs have been extensively studied to understand the causes of variation in reproductive output, there are almost no studies showing how these factors interact in explaining this variation. To examine this interaction, we used longitudinal demographic data from an 18-ye...

The recent trend for journals to require open access to primary data included in publications has been embraced by many biologists, but has caused apprehension amongst researchers engaged in long-term ecological and evolutionary studies. A worldwide survey of 73 principal investigators (Pls) with long-term studies revealed positive attitudes toward...

Stopover behaviour is a central element of migration strategies. But in recent geolocator studies, despite now being able to track individual songbirds during their entire migration, their stopover behaviour has received little attention. We used light-sensitive geolocators to identify the migratory routes and schedules of 12 northern wheatears (Oe...

Timing of breeding is a trait with considerable individual variation, often closely linked to fi tness because of seasonal declines in reproduction. Th e drivers of this variation have received much attention, but how reproductive costs may infl u-ence the timing of subsequent breeding has been largely unexplored. We examined a population of northe...

Funding Information The study was funded by The Swedish Research Council VR (grants to T. Abstract Adverse weather conditions during parental care may have direct consequences for offspring production, but longer-term effects on juvenile and parental sur-vival are less well known. We used long-term data on reproductive output, recruitment, and pare...

Captive breeding for conservation purposes presents a serious practical challenge because several conflicting genetic processes (i.e. inbreeding depression, random genetic drift and genetic adaptation to captivity) need to be managed in concert to maximize captive population persistence and reintroduction success probability. Because current geneti...

Cereal crop damage from granivorous birds poses a serious food security problem for subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. In this region, farmers may rely on human 'bird scarers' to limit crop damage. Here we report feeding behaviour and crop damage patterns caused by Village Weavers Ploceus cucullatus and African Mourning Doves Streptopelia d...

Species range shifts associated with environmental change or biological invasions are increasingly important study areas. However, quantifying range expansion rates may be heavily influenced by methodology and/or sampling bias. We compared expansion rate estimates of Roesel's bush-cricket (Metrioptera roeselii, Hagenbach 1822), a nonnative species...

Life-history theory predicts that the trade-off between parasite defense and other costly traits such as reproduction may be most evident when resources are scarce. The strength of selection that parasites inflict on their host may therefore vary across environmental conditions. Collared flycatchers (Ficedula albicollis) breeding on the Swedish isl...

Although the age and structure of local vegetation are commonly assumed to be indicators of habitat quality in breeding birds, for many species these relationships are poorly understood. We examined fledging success from 347 nests of the endangered New Zealand hihi (stitchbird Notiomystis cincta) from four predator-free island populations that diff...

Geolocators are small light-weight data loggers used to track individual migratory routes, and their use has increased exponentially in birds. However, the effects of geolocators on individual performance are still poorly known. We studied geolocator effects on a long-distance migrating passerine bird, the northern wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe L.)....

Current evidence of phenological responses to recent climate change is substantially biased towards northern hemisphere temperate regions. Given regional differences in climate change, shifts in phenology will not be uniform across the globe, and conclusions drawn from temperate systems in the northern hemisphere might not be applicable to other re...

Seasonal fitness declines are common, but the relative contribution of different reproductive components to the seasonal change in the production of reproductive young, and the component-specific drivers of this change is generally poorly known. We used long-term data (17 years) on breeding time (i.e. date of first egg laid) in northern wheatears (...

Parasites may influence the outcome of interspecific competition between closely related host species through lower parasite virulence in the host with which they share the longer evolutionary history. We tested this idea by comparing the prevalence of avian malaria (Haemosporidia) lineages and their association with survival in pied and collared f...

Land-breeding marine animals such as pen-guins, flying seabirds and pinnipeds are important com-ponents of marine ecosystems, and their abundance has been used extensively as an indication of ecosystem status and change. Until recently, many efforts to measure and monitor abundance of these species' groups have focussed on smaller populations and s...

I höstas reste de tre forskarna till Nepal för att erbjuda en avancerad kurs i fågelekologi och forskningsmetodik på masternivå i samverkan med National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC) i Sauraha. Den zoologiska forskningen i Nepal fokuserar främst på bevarande-biologi hos däggdjur och ett fåtal hotade fågelarter. Lite eller ingen forskning dri...

Patterns of polyandry in nuptial-gift-giving insects are often explained in terms of sexually antagonistic coevolution. However, the potential influence of environmental constraints and lifehistory traits on polyandry in these species is still largely unexplored. As an initial step in examining the role of these factors, this study measured the num...

Linear landscape elements are generally considered beneficial for promoting the movements of species between isolated habitats. However, relatively little consideration has been given to the effect of interconnections (nodes) between these elements: e.g. a simple linear element offers limited options for movement, whereas a network of such structur...

In 1995 and 1996, release of 51 hihi (stitchbird, Notiomystis cincta) onto Tiritiri Matangi Island (wild caught on Hauturu, Little Barrier Island) marked the start of a research and ecological restoration success story. Although establishment of populations of hihi elsewhere in New Zealand has proven to be difficult, the population on Tiritiri Mata...

Adjusting breeding phenology to climate fl uctuations can be problematic for migratory birds as they have to account for local environmental conditions on the breeding grounds while migrating from remote wintering areas. Predicting general responses to climate change is not straightforward, because these responses vary between migrant species due t...

Nest predation risk generally increases nearer forest-field edges in agricultural landscapes. However, few studies test whether differences in edge contrast (i.e. hard versus soft edges based on vegetation structure and height) affect edge-related predation patterns and if such patterns are related to changes in nest conspicuousness between incubat...

Few studies have examined interactions between resource availability, life-history traits and sexual conflict on species-specific provisioning rates, and within-individual variation of parental care. To this end, we used 1129 nest observation periods from 118 nests across 4 populations to examine how parental nest visitation varied according to sex...

1. Because habitats have profound effects on individual fitness, there is strong selection for improving the choice of breeding habitat. One possible mechanism is for individuals to use public information when prospecting future breeding sites; however, to our knowledge, no study has shown prospecting behaviour to be directly linked to subsequent c...

Two samples of snow petrel Pagodroma nivea mumiyo (solidified stomach oil) from Heimefrontfjella (74°34′36″S, 11°13′24″W) in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, were radiocarbon dated at 37,400±1,500 and 3,120±70years old (dates are corrected for the ‘reservoir effect’). The age of the older sample provides further evidence that snow petrel colonies ha...

Variation in morphological traits along latitudinal gradients often manifests as size clines. In insects, both positive and negative correlations are seen, and the mechanism behind the response is unclear. We studied variation in seven morphological traits of Roesel’s bush cricket, Metrioptera roeselii, sampled from seven latitude-matched-pair popu...

Reintroduction programmes need to be monitored as a way of gauging potential causes of their success or failure. This, in turn, can be used to improve the likelihood of future translocation success. Since the 1990s, stitchbird (or hihi: Notiomystis cincta) translocations have been intensively monitored, with comparisons between two of these project...