As wolves recolonize human-modified landscapes across the Old World, management programs aiming to mitigate livestock depredation while preserving wolf populations are falling short. The combination of human activity, habitat fragmentation, and mixed land use creates complex challenges for conservation management. Recolonized by wolves in the 1970s, the Golan Heights in northern Israel poses a dense mosaic landscape of risk, c...

We studied the relationship between sequence of foraging, energy acquired and use of torpor as an energy‐balancing strategy in diurnally active desert golden spiny mice. We hypothesised that individuals that arrive earlier to forage will get higher returns and consequently spend less time torpid. If that is the case, then early foragers can be viewed as more successful; if the same individuals arrive repeatedly early, they are...

Aim Global warming and other anthropogenic changes to the environment affect many aspects of biology and have often been invoked as causing body size changes in vertebrates. Here we examine a diverse set of carnivore populations in search of patterns in body size change that could reflect global warming (in accord with Bergmann's rule). Location Global. Methods We used > 4400 specimens representing 22 carnivore species in 52 p...

Aim Competition is hypothesized to lead to the evolution of reduced morphological overlap between competitors. Within guilds, this is believed to lead to overdispersed size ratios of the trophic apparatus of adjacent‐sized species. In allopatry, conditions are believed to favour character release. We examined whether character displacement is prevalent in mainland musteline guilds and sought evidence for character release in a...

A promising shortcut for quantifying species patterns is to use genera and families as surrogates of species. At large spatial scales, concurrence between patterns of richness, rarity, and composition of species and higher taxa is generally high. Only a few researchers, however, have examined this relationship at the local scale, which is frequently the relevant scale in land‐use conflicts. We investigated the reliability of t...

Aim M.V. Lomolino and colleagues have recently reviewed the island rule in mammals and other vertebrates, claiming it is a general pattern. They have portrayed our recent analysis as weakly supporting the island rule, seeing weakness in our use of what they considered to be inadequate size indices (skulls and teeth, rather than mass or body length) and in our use of large islands. They argue that size evolution on islands poin...

Body sizes of insular mammals often differ strikingly from those of their mainland conspecifics. Small islands have reduced numbers of competitor and predator species, and more limited resources. Such reductions are believed to select for predictable changes in body sizes, with large mammals growing progressively smaller as island area decreases, while small ones grow progressively larger. Medium‐sized mammals are thought to b...

Ecological character displacement, mostly seen as increased differences of size in sympatry between closely‐related or similar species, is a focal hypothesis assuming that species too similar to one another could not coexist without diverging, owing to interspecific competition. Thus, ecological character displacement and community‐wide character displacement (overdispersion in size of potential competitors within ecological g...

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is the process of identifying potential environmental effects of proposed development and the required mitigation measures. It is one of the most widely used planning tools today, but its ability to promote biodiversity conservation is largely unexplored. We studied the ecological component of the Israeli EIA system by reviewing a representative sample of 52 environmental impact statements...

Aim In Europe, winter severity is positively correlated with longitude. We test how this climatic cline affects biogeographical patterns in Western Palearctic homeotherms. Location Eurasia, west of 60° longitude. Methods We test the effects of longitude on body size of carnivores, using cranial measurements of 2002 specimens belonging to 11 species. We test the effects of longitude on migration patterns of birds by comparing w...

Because most reintroduced species are rare, data on their dynamics are scarce. Consequently, reintroduction programs often rely on data from other species or captive populations to project the performance of the reintroduced population in the wild. We compared the reproductive success and survival of a Persian fallow deer ( Dama mesopotamica ) population reintroduced in Israel over the first 5 years of the project with the sur...