Contextual influences on animal decision-making: Significance for behavior-based wildlife conservation and management
Average rating
Cast your vote
You can rate an item by clicking the amount of stars they wish to award to this item.
When enough users have cast their vote on this item, the average rating will also be shown.
Star rating
Your vote was cast
Thank you for your feedback
Thank you for your feedback
Date Issued
2017Common Name
1749-4877Journal
Integrative ZoologyVolume
12Issue
1Start page
32End page
48
Metadata
Show full item recordAlternative link
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1749-4877.12235/abstractAbstract
Survival and successful reproduction require animals to make critical decisions amidst a naturally dynamic environmental and social background (i.e. “context”). However, human activities have pervasively, and rapidly, extended contextual variation into evolutionarily novel territory, potentially rendering evolved animal decision-making mechanisms and strategies maladaptive. We suggest that explicitly focusing on animal decision-making (ADM), by integrating and applying findings from studies of sensory ecology, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics and eco-evolutionary strategies, may enhance our understanding of, and our ability to predict how, human-driven changes in the environment and population demography will influence animal populations. Fundamentally, the decisions animals make involve evolved mechanisms, and behaviors emerge from the combined action of sensory integration, cognitive mechanisms and strategic rules of thumb, and any of these processes may have a disproportionate influence on behavior. Although there is extensive literature exploring ADM, it generally reflects a canalized, discipline-specific approach that lacks a unified conceptual framework. As a result, there has been limited application of ADM theory and research findings into predictive models that can enhance management outcomes, even though it is likely that the relative resilience of species to rapid environmental change is fundamentally a result of how ADM is linked to contextual variation. Here, we focus on how context influences ADM, and highlight ideas and results that may be most applicable to conservation biology.Type
ArticleRights
© 2016 International Society of Zoological Sciences, Institute of Zoology/Chinese Academy of Sciences and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltdae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1111/1749-4877.12235
Scopus Count
Collections