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Water sources aggregate parasites, with increasing effects in more arid conditions

Shifts in landscape heterogeneity and climate can influence animal behavior and movement in ways that profoundly alter disease transmission. Amid accelerating climate and land use changes, it is increasingly important to identify and monitor hotspots of increased animal activity and overlap where disease transmission is likely to occur. Water sources that are foci of animal activity have great potential to promote disease transmission, but there has been very little work to quantify this, nor any comparison across a range of

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Dynamics of ungulates in relation to climatic and land use changes in an insularized African savanna ecosystem

Land use change and human population growth are accelerating the fragmentation and insularization of wildlife habitats worldwide. The conservation and management of wildlife in the resultant ‘island’ ecosystems in the context of global warming is challenging due to the isolation and reduced size of the ecosystems and hence the scale over which ecosystem processes can operate. We analyzed trends in numbers of nine large herbivores in Kenya’s Lake Nakuru National Park to understand how rainfall and temperature variability, surrounding land

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Regional Differences in Seasonal Timing of Rainfall Discriminate between Genetically Distinct East African Giraffe Taxa

Masai (Giraffa tippelskirchi), Reticulated (G. reticulata) and Rothschild’s (G. camelopardalis) giraffe lineages in East Africa are morphologically and genetically distinct, yet in Kenya their ranges abut. This raises the question of how divergence is maintained among populations of a large mammal capable of long-distance travel, and which readily hybridize in zoos. Here we test four hypotheses concerning the maintenance of the phylogeographic boundaries among the three taxa: 1) isolation-by-distance; 2) physical barriers to dispersal; 3) general habitat differences resulting in

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Effect of low rainfall and browsing by large herbivores on an enclosed savannah habitat in Kenya

Savannah ecosystems in East Africa are rarely stable and can experience rapid local changes from dense woodlands to open plains. In this 3-year study there was a reduction of 16.3% in a height-stratified sample of nearly 1000 individually marked Acacia drepanolobium trees. The study was carried out in an enclosed fire-free wooded grassland habitat in the Laikipia region of Kenya. The trees were monitored from 1998 to 2001, a period that included 12 months when rainfall was 60% below average.

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