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  • Presentation | B12F: Understanding Phenological Responses, Changes, and Feedbacks: Patterns, Mechanisms, and Consequences I Oral
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  • B12F-05: Where the Acorns Fall – Connecting Masting and Foraging Behavior of Animals
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  • Board 1663‚ 260
    NOLA CC
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Author(s):
Lea Végh, National Institute for Environmental Studies (First Author, Presenting Author)
Tomomichi Kato, Hokkaido University


The number of wildlife conflicts, ranging from crop damage to fatal encounters, is prone to increase in years when animals cannot find enough food in their natural habitats. Forest animals often involved in these conflicts are deer, boars, and bears, who forage on the seeds of oaks and beech, acorns and nuts. These tree species synchronize their flowering and seed production across wide geographical ranges, so in some years all of them flower and grow seeds in vast amounts, whereas in other years there are almost no acorns found in the whole forest. This irregularity forces animals in lean years to look for food closer to human settlements. To better understand how animal behavior is influenced by the presence of acorns and nuts, we deployed camera traps to observe how often and for how long do they visit locations with high or low probability of acorns and nuts present. In the future, we plan to connect changes in behavior to simulations of future seed production, in order to predict when and where there is an increased risk of human-wildlife encounters and prepare for them in advance.



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