Urs Kalbitzer | Kibale Ecology and Conservation Project

Cascading effects of climate change on primate habitats, behavior, and survival

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Project Aim

For long-lived animals, behavioral flexibility is essential in the face of rapid anthropogenic change. Therefore, we are examining how climate change impacts red colobus food availability, how the monkey adjust their behavior, and how climate, food availablity, and behavior together influence demographic patterns. Building on previous research on red colobus foraging and habitat use, and analyzing long-term leaf phenology data (1998 to 2021), our first results show that leaf production of preferred tree species are linked to solar radiation and atmospheric CO2 ( . Ongoing analyses investigate the behavioral and demographic consequences of these patterns.

Contact Information

Urs Kalbitzer, Laura Lüthy

Food Resource Landscapes

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Project Aim

Many aspects of animal behavior and life histories are have been associated to the spatial and temporal distribution of food resources. For example, in primates and other animals, the spatial concentration (clumpedness) of foods impacts competitive regimes and social structure, while seasonality of foods influences reproductive timing. Past research often relied on coarse dietary categories (e.g., leaves vs. fruit). Therefore, our goal is to develop finer-grained maps of food resource distributions to test socioecological and life-history hypotheses.

Analyses of plant phenology and distribution data from Kibale reveal strong interspecific variation in the timing and spatial patterning of leaf and fruit production. To obtain more information about this variability, we are integrating drone imagery and machine-learning classifications with long-term phenological and nutritional datasets to build dynamic, high-resolution food-resource landscapes for Kibale National Park. We will use these landscapes to quantify the spatiotemporal distribution of plant foods (e.g., seasonality, predictability, clumpedness) and to test research hypotheses about the behavior and life-histories of primates and other animal in Kibale.

For additional habitats, we aim to develop scalable, satellite-based methods to estimate canopy structure and validate them against the Kibale resource maps. Where local phenology datasets exist at other sites, we will integrate those datasets. For sites without such datasets, we will estimate fruit and leaf production from satellite time series calibrated with Kibale-based models. The outputs will be site-level estimates of clumpedness, predictability, and seasonality for key food resources.

Contact Information

Urs Kalbitzer

Primate and Mammal Population Dynamics.

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Project Description and Aims

The vast majority of conservation projects do not measure how they improve biodiversity. We want Kibale to be different. Thus, we are monitoring the relative abundance of the common diurnal primates, ungulates, and elephants throughout the park. Some of our monitoring builds on the work of others and starts in 1970 making our data some of the longest in existence for tropical systems. Park wide animal populations are generally increasing – a very positive message for conservation.

Contact Information

Colin Chapman, Dipto Sarkar, Jan Gogarten, Patrick Omeja, Urs Kalbitzer

Primate Ecology and Behavior

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Project Desciption and Aims

Nonhuman primates’ social and dietary diversity make them ideal for testing socioecological hypotheses. Kibale National Park is exceptional in this regard, with 13 primate species spanning diverse diets, group sizes and dynamics, social structures, mating systems, movement patterns, and other behavioral dimensions. Within this context, we investigate the causes and consequences of behavioral variation, with an emphasis on the folivorous Ugandan red colobus (Piliocolobus tephrosceles).

Current projects, drawing on more than a decade of data, examine context-dependent dietary preferences (using tree phenology and distribution), social relationships, and ranging. Ongoing work integrates high-resolution food-resource maps with behavioral observations and GPS-collar data to link food distribution to social dynamics, activity budgets, and movement.

Contact Information

Urs Kalbitzer, Colin Chapman, Martin Golooba

Urs Kalbitzer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Urs Kalbitzer examines the behavioral mechanisms that link environmental variability to animal fitness, with a focus on primates. Working primarily in Kibale and other tropical field sites, he integrates long term behavioral, demographic, and population datasets with plant ecology and remote sensing.

For his PhD (University of Göttingen, 2014), Urs investigated variation in male aggressiveness in baboons (Papio spp.) using field observations, endocrinology, and genetics. As a postdoc as the University of Calgary and McGill University, he analyzed long-term data to quantify the fitness trade-offs of female social integration in white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator) and how female dispersal patterns shapes relationships in red colobus (Piliocolobus tephrosceles). At McGill, and since 2020 in Konstanz, he expanded to ecological habitat assessments – combining plant ecological and remote sensing data – to test socio-ecological hypotheses and evaluate how environmental change affects primate habitats, behavior, and survival.

Two complementary themes structure his work, linking individual behavior to population processes and environmental variability through analyses of long-term datasets and and fined-grained field measurement:

Ecology and evolution of primate social diversity and
Cascading effects of environmental change on primate habitats, behavior, and survival