Efforts to reduce livestock losses to large carnivores are widely regarded as essential for promoting human–carnivore coexistence. Predator‐proof enclosures, compensation programs, improved livestock guarding, and real‐time predator alert systems can reduce depredation and retaliatory killing while enhancing pastoralist livelihoods. However, reducing livestock production risks may also alter livestock management decisions in w...

The outcome of pathogen spillover from a reservoir to a novel host population can range from a “dead‐end” when there is no onward transmission in the recipient population, to epidemic spread and even establishment in new hosts. Understanding the evolutionary epidemiology of spillover events leading to discrete outcomes in novel hosts is key to predicting risk and can lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms of emergenc...

Understanding the role of species interactions within communities is a central focus of ecology. A key challenge is to understand variation in species interactions along environmental gradients. The stress gradient hypothesis posits that positive interactions increase and competitive interactions decrease with increasing consumer pressure or environmental stress. This hypothesis has received extensive attention in plant commun...

Pathogens are embedded in a complex network of microparasites that can collectively or individually alter disease dynamics and outcomes. Endemic pathogens that infect an individual in the first years of life, for example, can either facilitate or compete with subsequent pathogens thereby exacerbating or ameliorating morbidity and mortality. Pathogen associations are ubiquitous but poorly understood, particularly in wild popula...

The current extinction and climate change crises pressure us to predict population dynamics with ever‐greater accuracy. Although predictions rest on the well‐advanced theory of age‐structured populations, two key issues remain poorly explored. Specifically, how the age‐dependency in demographic rates and the year‐to‐year interactions between survival and fecundity affect stochastic population growth rates. We use inference, si...

Article impact statement : Wildlife‐based land management should be based on consistent principles for promoting sustainability.

Citizen science has the potential to expand the scope and scale of research in ecology and conservation, but many professional researchers remain skeptical of data produced by nonexperts. We devised an approach for producing accurate, reliable data from untrained, nonexpert volunteers. On the citizen science website www.snapshotserengeti.org , more than 28,000 volunteers classified 1.51 million images taken in a large‐scale ca...

Understanding how entire ecosystems maintain stability in the face of climatic and human disturbance is one of the most fundamental challenges in ecology. Theory suggests that a crucial factor determining the degree of ecosystem stability is simply the degree of synchrony with which different species in ecological food webs respond to environmental stochasticity. Ecosystems in which all food‐web pathways are affected similarly...

Ecology Letters (2009) 12: 1347–1356 Abstract It is well established that ageing handicaps the ability of prey to escape predators, yet surprisingly little is known about how ageing affects the ability of predators to catch prey. Research into long‐lived predators has assumed that adults have uniform impacts on prey regardless of age. Here we use longitudinal data from repeated observations of individually‐known wolves ( Canis...

Habitat quality is typically inferred by assuming a direct relationship between consumer density and resource abundance, although it has been suggested that consumer fitness may be a more accurate measure of habitat quality. We examined density vs. fitness‐based measures of habitat quality for lions in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. A 40‐year average of female reproductive success (yearling cubs per female) was best ex...

Recent outbreaks of rabies and canine distemper in wildlife populations of the Serengeti show that infectious disease constitutes a significant cause of mortality that can result in regional extirpation of endangered species even within large, well‐protected areas. Nevertheless, effective management of an infectious disease depends critically on understanding the epidemiological dynamics of the causative pathogen. Pathogens wi...

Tanzania is a premier destination for trophy hunting of African lions (Panthera leo) and is home to the most extensive long‐term study of unhunted lions. Thus, it provides a unique opportunity to apply data from a long‐term field study to a conservation dilemma: How can a trophy‐hunted species whose reproductive success is closely tied to social stability be harvested sustainably? We used an individually based, spatially expli...

Predator control programmes are generally implemented in an attempt to increase prey population sizes. However, predator removal could prove harmful to prey populations that are regulated primarily by parasitic infections rather than by predation. We develop models for microparasitic and macroparasitic infection that specify the conditions where predator removal will (a) increase the incidence of parasitic infection, (b) reduc...