Social structures and habitat configuration influence inbreeding in wild populations. In harem‐forming, female‐defence polygynous equids, social organization promotes inbreeding avoidance, but this has not been studied in fission–fusion, resource‐defence equid species. Because reproduction depends on solitary males establishing territories near resources, shifts in resource distribution are expected to affect mating patterns a...

Aim Animal movements are a fundamental process affecting communities and ecosystems. Quantifying habitat selection across species and habitats is key for understanding how animals respond to environmental change. Currently, we lack comparative studies that examine how habitat selection varies across species traits and landscapes. We aim to quantify global patterns of habitat selection to help understand the fundamental drivers...

The composition of mammalian gut microbiomes is highly conserved within species, yet the mechanisms by which microbiome composition is transmitted and maintained within lineages of wild animals remain unclear. Mutually compatible hypotheses exist, including that microbiome fidelity results from inherited dietary habits, shared environmental exposure, morphophysiological filtering and/or maternal effects. Interspecific hybrids...

Aim Macroecological studies that require habitat suitability data for many species often derive this information from expert opinion. However, expert‐based information is inherently subjective and thus prone to errors. The increasing availability of GPS tracking data offers opportunities to evaluate and supplement expert‐based information with detailed empirical evidence. Here, we compared expert‐based habitat suitability info...

Aim Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroecology. We provide global range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal spec...

The forage maturation hypothesis (FMH) states that energy intake for ungulates is maximised when forage biomass is at intermediate levels. Nevertheless, metabolic allometry and different digestive systems suggest that resource selection should vary across ungulate species. By combining GPS relocations with remotely sensed data on forage characteristics and surface water, we quantified the effect of body size and digestive syst...

Small cetaceans face persistent threats from fisheries interactions, making effective mitigation a priority for conservation. In southwest Florida, interactions come primarily from small-scale recreational hook and line and trap/pot fisheries, with regional stranding network partners working with federal agency managers to assess and intervene as possible in cases of live animal entanglement. Evaluating success of intervention...

One of the most iconic wild equids, the plains zebra occupies a broad region of sub‐Saharan Africa and exhibits a wide range of phenotypic diversity in stripe patterns that have been used to classify multiple subspecies. After decades of relative stability, albeit with a loss of at least one recognized subspecies, the total population of plains zebras has undergone an approximate 25% decline since 2002. Individuals with abnorm...

Social connectivity is important for measuring the fitness of common bottlenose dolphins ( Tursiops truncatus ). While interactions in fission‐fusion societies vary between individuals, studies show that repeated interactions enhance reproduction and foraging success. Injuries that potentially remove an individual from its association network may disrupt these interactions. Using data from the long‐term resident dolphin commun...

Effective population size, a central concept in conservation biology, is now routinely estimated from genetic surveys and can also be theoretically predicted from demographic, life‐history, and mating‐system data. By evaluating the consistency of theoretical predictions with empirically estimated effective size, insights can be gained regarding life‐history characteristics and the relative impact of different life‐history trai...

Understanding how humans and other animals behave in response to changes in their environments is vital for predicting population dynamics and the trajectory of coupled social‐ecological systems. Here, we present a novel framework for identifying emergent social behaviours in foragers (including humans engaged in fishing or hunting) in predator–prey contexts based on the exploration difficulty and exploitation potential of a r...

Invasive species can indirectly affect ecosystem processes via the disruption of mutualisms. The mutualism between the whistling thorn acacia ( Acacia drepanolobium ) and four species of symbiotic ants is an ecologically important one; ants strongly defend trees against elephants, which can otherwise have dramatic impacts on tree cover. In Laikipia, Kenya, the invasive big‐headed ant ( Pheidole megacephala ) has established it...