Understanding species‐ or population‐specific dietary specialisation is key to informing habitat conservation needs and successful ex situ recovery programs for many endangered species. One of the most endangered populations in Canada, the behaviourally distinct deep‐snow ecotype of the Southern Mountain caribou, is characterised by a winter diet of arboreal rather than terrestrial lichens. We hypothesised that this dietary va...

Migration enables animals to access seasonally and spatially varying resources, resulting in greater abundance compared to analogous non‐migratory wildlife. Both Western science and Indigenous knowledge recognize the critical role of migration in sustaining wildlife; yet these movements are increasingly disrupted by human activity worldwide. Despite their importance, long‐term changes in migratory patterns for large mammals re...

Anthropogenic habitat alteration and climate change are two well‐known contributors to biodiversity loss through changes to species distribution and abundance; yet, disentangling the effects of these two factors is often hindered by their inherent confound across both space and time. We leveraged a contrast in habitat alteration associated with the jurisdictional boundary between two Canadian provinces to evaluate the relative...

Optimizing energy acquisition and expenditure is a fundamental trade‐off for consumers, strikingly reflected in how mobile organisms use space. Several studies have established that home range size decreases as resource density increases, but the balance of costs and benefits associated with exploiting a given resource density is unclear. We evaluate how the ability of consumers to exploit their resources through movement (ter...

Selection forces that favour different phenotypes in different environments can change frequencies of genes between populations along environmental clines. Clines are also compatible with balancing forces, such as negative frequency‐dependent selection (NFDS), which maintains phenotypic polymorphisms within populations. For example, NFDS is hypothesized to maintain partial migration, a dimorphic behavioural trait prominent in...

Apparent competition is an indirect interaction between 2 or more prey species through a shared predator, and it is increasingly recognized as a mechanism of the decline and extinction of many species. Through case studies, we evaluated the effectiveness of 4 management strategies for species affected by apparent competition: predator control, reduction in the abundances of alternate prey, simultaneous control of predators and...

Identifying conservation units below the species level is becoming increasingly important, particularly when limited resources necessitate prioritization for conservation among such units. This problem is exemplified with caribou, a mammal with a circum‐Arctic distribution that is exposed to a broad spectrum of ecological conditions, but is also declining in many parts of its range. We used microsatellite markers to evaluate t...

Allee effects can have significant consequences for small populations and understanding the causal mechanisms for such effects is important for guiding conservation actions. One proposed mechanism is through predation, in which a type II functional response leads to increasing predation rates as prey numbers decline. However, models to support this mechanism have incorporated only a single declining prey species in the functio...