Papers by Pierre-Yves Henry
The table shows the 54 gap species ordered by species group. Please note: The comment column is b... more The table shows the 54 gap species ordered by species group. Please note: The comment column is based on expert opinion of the European Topic Centre, which has the latest version of the Natura2000 data base and also knowledge on confidential sites, which are deleted from the public version of the data base to protect rare species.
Ecological Indicators, 2018
Nature Conservation, 2012
This Editorial presents the focus, scope and policies of the inaugural issue of Nature Conservati... more This Editorial presents the focus, scope and policies of the inaugural issue of Nature Conservation, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal bridging natural sciences, social sciences and hands-on applications in conservation management. The journal covers all aspects of nature conservation and aims particularly at facilitating better interaction between scientists and practitioners. The journal will impose no restrictions on manuscript size or the use of colour. We will use an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting-edge innovations in publishing and information dissemination. These include semantic markup of, and enhancements to published text, data, and extensive cross-linking within the journal and to external sources. We believe the journal will make an important contribution to better linking science and practice, offers rapid, peer-reviewed and flexible publication for authors and unrestricted access to content.
Nature Conservation, Mar 14, 2012
This Editorial presents the focus, scope and policies of the inaugural issue of Nature Conservati... more This Editorial presents the focus, scope and policies of the inaugural issue of Nature Conservation, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal bridging natural sciences, social sciences and hands-on applications in conservation management. The journal covers all aspects of nature conservation and aims particularly at facilitating better interaction between scientists and practitioners. The journal will impose no restrictions on manuscript size or the use of colour. We will use an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting- ...
Data of juvenile house sparrows captured in 4 sites in France. Data include the date of capture (... more Data of juvenile house sparrows captured in 4 sites in France. Data include the date of capture (2 formats), the site of capture, the urbanization score of the site, the feather corticosterone level expressed either in ng/mg or in ng/mm, the sex, the Scaled Mass Index (SMI), the tarsus length, the body mass, and the levels of baseline and stress-induced corticosterone in plasma
Urban landscapes are associated with abiotic and biotic environmental changes that may result in ... more Urban landscapes are associated with abiotic and biotic environmental changes that may result in potential stressors for wild vertebrates. Urban exploiters have physiological, morphological and behavioral adaptations to live in cities. However, there is increasing evidence that urban exploiters themselves can suffer from urban conditions, especially during specific life-history stages. We looked for a link between the degree of urbanization and the level of developmental stress in an urban exploiter (the house sparrow, Passer domesticus), which has recently been declining in multiple European cities (e.g. London, UK). Specifically, we conducted a large-scale study and sampled juvenile sparrows in 11 urban and rural sites to evaluate their feather corticosterone (CORT) levels. We found that juvenile feather CORT levels were positively correlated with the degree of urbanization, supporting the idea that developing house sparrows may suffer from urban environmental conditions. However, we did not find any correlation between juvenile feather CORT levels and body size, mass, or body condition. This suggests either that the growth and condition of urban sparrows are not impacted by elevated developmental CORT levels, or that urban sparrows may compensate for developmental constraints once they have left the nest. Although feather CORT levels were not correlated with baseline CORT levels, we found that feather CORT levels were slightly and positively correlated with the CORT stress response in juveniles. This suggests that urban developmental conditions may potentially have long-lasting effects on stress physiology and stress sensitivity in this urban exploiter
Ecology and Evolution, 2018
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2017
h i g h l i g h t s • Juvenile and adult sparrows were captured at 30 sites that differ in urbani... more h i g h l i g h t s • Juvenile and adult sparrows were captured at 30 sites that differ in urbanization rates. • Body size and plumage quality were negatively correlated with urbanization. • The impact of urbanization on feather quality was only observed in juveniles. • Urban environments energetically constrain sparrows during their development only.
The survival cost of reproduction has been revealed in many free-ranging vertebrates. However, re... more The survival cost of reproduction has been revealed in many free-ranging vertebrates. However, recent studies on captive populations failed to detect this cost. Theoretically, this lack of survival/reproduction trade-off is expected when resources are not limiting, but these studies may have failed to detect the cost, as they may not have fully accounted for potential confounding effects, in particular inter-individual heterogeneity. Here we investigated the effects of current and past reproductive effort on later survival in captive females of a small primate, the grey mouse lemur. Survival analyses showed no cost of reproduction in females; and the pattern was even in the opposite direction: the higher the reproductive effort, the higher the chances of survival until the next reproductive event. These conclusions hold even while accounting for inter-individual heterogeneity. In agreement with aforementioned studies on captive vertebrates, these results remind us that reproduction is expected to be traded against body maintenance and the survival prospect only when resources are so limiting that they induce an allocation trade-off. Thus, the cost of reproduction has a major extrinsic component driven by environmental conditions
Frontiers in Physiology, 2020
Heterothermy allows organisms to cope with fluctuating environmental conditions. The use of regul... more Heterothermy allows organisms to cope with fluctuating environmental conditions. The use of regulated hypometabolism allows seasonal heterothermic species to cope with annual resource shortages and thus to maximize survival during the unfavorable season. This comes with deep physiological remodeling at each seasonal transition to allow the organism to adjust to the changing environment. In the wild, this adaptation is highly beneficial and largely overcomes potential costs. However, researchers recently proposed that it might also generate both ecological and physiological costs for the organism. Here, we propose new perspectives to be considered when analyzing adaptation to seasonality, in particular considering these costs. We propose a list of putative costs, including DNA damage, inflammatory response to fat load, brain and cognitive defects, digestive malfunction and immunodeficiency, that should receive more attention in future research on physiological seasonality. These costs may only be marginal at each transition event but accumulate over time and therefore emerge with age. In this context, studies in captivity, where we have access to aging individuals with limited extrinsic mortality (e.g., predation), could be highly valuable to experimentally assess the costs of physiological flexibility. Finally, we offer new perspectives, which should be included in demographic models, on how the adaptive value of physiological flexibility could be altered in the future in the context of global warming.
Ecography, 2018
Body size is implicated in individual fitness and population dynamics. Mounting interest is being... more Body size is implicated in individual fitness and population dynamics. Mounting interest is being given to the effects of environmental change on body size, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We tested whether body size and body condition are related to ambient temperature (heat maintenance hypothesis), or/and explained by variations in primary production (food availability hypothesis) during the period of body growth in songbirds. We also explored whether annual population-level variations of mean body size are due to changes of juvenile growth and/or size-dependent mortality during the first year. For 41 species, from 257 sites across France, we tested for relationships between wing length (n = 107,193) or body condition (n = 82,022) and local anomalies in temperature, precipitation and net primary production (NDVI) during the breeding period, for juveniles and adults separately. Juvenile body size was best explained by primary production: wings were longer in years with locally high NDVI, but not shorter in years with low NDVI. Temperature showed a slightly positive effect. Body condition and adult wing length did not covary with any of the other tested variables. We found no evidence of climate-driven size-dependent mortality for the breeding season. In our temperate system, local climatic anomalies explained little of the body size variation. A large part of wing length variance was site-specific, suggesting that avian size was more dependent on local drivers than global ones. Net primary production influenced juvenile size the most through effects on body growth. We suggest that, during the breeding season in temperate systems, thermoregulatory mechanisms are less involved in juvenile growth than food assimilation.
European Journal of Wildlife Research
Urban Ecosystems
Increasing urbanisation and human pressure on lands have huge impacts on biodiversity. Some speci... more Increasing urbanisation and human pressure on lands have huge impacts on biodiversity. Some species, known as “urban exploiters”, manage to expand in urban landscapes, relying on human resources. The House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is the perfect example of a human-commensal species. Surprisingly, this urban exploiter has been declining all over Europe over the past decades. The proximate causes of this decline remain poorly understood. We particularly lack understanding about urban habitat characteristics that are particularly unfavourable for House Sparrows. In the present study, we analysed fine-scale habitat characteristics of House Sparrow population sizes and trends using a fifteen-year House Sparrow census (2003–2017) covering the urban diversity of Paris (nearly 200 census sites), one of the densest European cities. We documented for the first time the dramatic decline (−89%) of the species in Paris over the study period. The temporal decline over the whole city correlates...
Ecology and Evolution
The cost of reproduction (CoR) is a central mechanism in the evolution of species' life-history t... more The cost of reproduction (CoR) is a central mechanism in the evolution of species' life-history traits. Because acquired resources are finite, fitness is maximized for an optimal balance between the allocation to current fecundity versus the allocation to survival and future reproduction (Cody, 1966; Reznick, 1985; Stearns, 1989; Williams, 1966). This has proved a robust theory for explaining the difference in life-history strategies within and between clades (e.g.,Charnov, 2002; Linden & Møller, 1989). Within species however, the role played by CoR in generating variance in individuals' life trajectories is yet largely unknown. Experimental procedures-such as artificially increasing reproductive load-generally succeed to evidence costs (see in Boonekamp, Salomons, Bouwhuis, Dijkstra, & Verhulst, 2014; reviewed in Santos & Nakagawa, 2012). But evidencing CoR from longitudinal demographic data has proved difficult. It is particularly the case for evidencing survival CoR (rather than reproductive CoR as in Kroeger, Blumstein, Armitage, Reid, & Martin, 2018) and long-term CoR (rather than short-term CoR as in Froy,
Ecology and evolution, 2017
Species traits have been hypothesized by one of us (Ponge, 2013) to evolve in a correlated manner... more Species traits have been hypothesized by one of us (Ponge, 2013) to evolve in a correlated manner as species colonize stable, undisturbed habitats, shifting from "ancestral" to "derived" strategies. We predicted that generalism, r-selection, sexual monomorphism, and migration/gregariousness are the ancestral states (collectively called strategy A) and evolved correlatively toward specialism, K-selection, sexual dimorphism, and residence/territoriality as habitat stabilized (collectively called B strategy). We analyzed the correlated evolution of four syndromes, summarizing the covariation between 53 traits, respectively, involved in ecological specialization, r-K gradient, sexual selection, and dispersal/social behaviors in 81 species representative of Fringillidae, a bird family with available natural history information and that shows variability for all these traits. The ancestrality of strategy A was supported for three of the four syndromes, the ancestrality...
Ecology letters, Jul 1, 2017
Ageing results from the accumulation of multifactorial damage over time. However, the temporal di... more Ageing results from the accumulation of multifactorial damage over time. However, the temporal distribution of this damage remains unknown. In seasonal species, transitions between seasons are critical periods of massive physiological remodelling. We hypothesised that these recurrent peaks of physiological remodelling are costly in terms of survival. We tested whether captive small primates exposed to an experimentally increased frequency of seasonal transitions die sooner than individuals living under natural seasonality. The results show that experiencing one additional season per year increases the mortality hazard by a factor of 3 to 4, whereas the expected number of seasons lived is only slightly impacted by the seasonal rhythm. These results demonstrate that physiological transitions between periods of high and low metabolic activity represent a major mortality risk for seasonal organisms, which has been ignored until now.
Physiological and biochemical zoology : PBZ
Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are involved in a variety of physiological mechanisms, includ... more Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are involved in a variety of physiological mechanisms, including heterothermy preparation and expression. However, the effects of the two major classes of PUFAs, n-6 and n-3, can differ substantially. While n-6 PUFAs enhance torpor expression, n-3 PUFAs reduce the ability to decrease body temperature. This negative impact of n-3 PUFAs has been revealed in temperate hibernators only. Yet because tropical heterotherms generally experience higher ambient temperature and exhibit higher minimum body temperature during heterothermy, they may not be affected as much by PUFAs as their temperate counterparts. We tested whether n-3 PUFAs constrain torpor use in a tropical daily heterotherm (Microcebus murinus). We expected dietary n-3 PUFA supplementation to induce a reduction in torpor use and for this effect to appear rapidly given the time required for dietary fatty acids to be assimilated into phospholipids. n-3 PUFA supplementation reduced torpor use, ...
PLOS ONE, 2016
¶ Membership of the Group Cigognes France is provided in the Acknowledgments.
This document is a powerpoint presentation, in French. Sous les tropiques, les changements climat... more This document is a powerpoint presentation, in French. Sous les tropiques, les changements climatiques sont moins bien compris - et moins étudiés - qu’aux latitudes et altitudes élevées. A Madagascar, ils se traduiraient par une modification des cycles climatiques (El Niño, Southern Oscillation Index) et une augmentation de la fréquence et l’intensité des évènements climatiques extrêmes (cyclones, sécheresses), avec des changements directionnels régionaux modérés (réchauffements, augmentation de précipitations). Mais, par rapport au reste du globe, les impacts des changements climatiques à Madagascar ont été largement ignorés (hormis pour les récifs coralliens). Quels changements sont attendus et/ou observés ? Quelles implications ont-ils pour la gestion de la biodiversité ? Nous présenterons une synthèse des connaissances publiées disponibles pour les biologistes sur les changements climatiques à Madagascar, et les perspectives de recherche que cela ouvre sur la résilience des orga...
Uploads
Papers by Pierre-Yves Henry