Emerging Topics in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, ecological thinking and sustainability have been interconnected by complex economic, social and environmental issues. Human populations continue to grow worldwide, and anthropogenic ecosystem changes increasingly affect nature: habitat degradation, fragmentation, and global warming change essential living conditions for plants and animals, including humans. There are increasing opportunities for contact among humans, and between domestic and wild animals, potentially intensifying the emergence of new infectious diseases. Concurrently, nations struggle with emerging challenges, and understanding the role of wildlife in emerging new diseases is as important as developing new medicines, drugs and vaccines.

With time, conflict management strategies have covered the manipulative management of populations and habitats (e.g., lethal control, translocation, population regulation, and protection of endangered species). Recent management approaches attempt to use scientific research and the arsenal of new technical tools, from molecular genetics to unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). As human–wildlife conflicts generate costs, their mitigation is a fundamental problem in conserving biodiversity, ecosystems, and populations of all kinds. Wildlife conservation is a tremendous challenge and depends on reliable knowledge of humans and wildlife’s complex interdependence.

There are a total of nine critical topics for the Special Issue:

• Human–Wildlife Conflict: challenges and solutions for coexistence with wildlife in cities and human habitations;
• Population dynamics, monitoring and the adaptive management of wild populations, and the use of 21st-century technologies from the study to active conservation of wildlife;
• Conserving genetic diversity of wildlife: the importance of scales and connectivity, and how new technologies can improve understanding of consequences of population manipulation;
• Evidence-based wildlife conservation: from data collection to systematic monitoring, and the future of citizen sciences based on high-tech gadgets
• Measuring and recognising the conservation success of recovered species: from evidence to change in legislation and reestablished use;
• Learning from success: unexpected recoveries of endangered species and the success of invasive species – how to use them as valuable examples;
• Wildlife management in 21st-century agricultural landscapes, man-made forests, and urban-dominated areas;
• Emerging new diseases and parasites: wildlife conservation and SARS-CoV-2 or other zoonotic diseases and the One Health approach;
• Conservation of wildlife in conflict zones, armed conflicts, and the long-term consequences of political or economic changes on country-wide or regional scales;

In this Special Issue, we would like to invite a wide range of papers that deal with the topics mentioned above at different scales, e.g., management units, a region, a country, or a global scale. These topics may broaden based on the submitted abstracts and suggestions of the authors. We encourage authors to reflect on the methodological challenges of the work at the given scale. We want to keep things as open as possible and allow for flexibility at later phases. Please be so kind as to share your thoughts about the above-listed topics and let us know if you have any proposals to consider.

Prof. Dr. Sándor Csányi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• adaptive management of wildlife
• emerging new diseases and parasites
• evidence-based wildlife conservation
• human–wildlife conflicts
• population recovery
• urban wildlife conservation
• wildlife genomics
• wildlife in 21st-century agricultural landscapes
• wildlife in conflict zones