Protected Areas and Effective Biodiversity Conservation Le Saout, Soizic; Hoffmann, Michael; Shi, Yichuan ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/2013, Letnik:
342, Številka:
6160
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Although protected areas (PAs) cover 13% of Earth's land (1), substantial gaps remain in their coverage of global biodiversity (2). Thus, there has been emphasis on strategic expansion of the global ...PA network (3-5). However, because PAs are often understaffed, underfunded, and beleaguered in the face of external threats (6, 7), efforts to expand PA coverage should be complemented by appropriate management of existing PAs. Previous calls for enhancing PA management have focused on improving operational effectiveness of each PA e.g., staffing and budgets (6). Little guidance has been offered on how to improve collective effectiveness for meeting global biodiversity conservation goals (3). We provide guidance for strategically allocating management efforts among and within existing PAs to strengthen their collective contribution toward preventing global species extinctions.
The scarcity or unpredictability of natural resources is a threat to cooperation within human societies. Exacerbated competition between individuals could affect social cohesion and collective ...action, generate conflicts over natural resources, and compromise their sustainable use. Yet, our in-depth archaeological study of the arid Andean highlands of Bolivia reveals the sustainable development of a complex agrarian society in a harsh environment marked, moreover, by a prolonged climatic degradation from the 13th to the 15th centuries. The 49 community settlements studied comprised independent family households that managed their own economic resources. A detailed study of the granary and housing structures of 549 of these households provided a strong quantitative data set for an analysis of Gini coefficients for grain storage capacity and housing area. This agro-pastoral society flourished with neither notable inequalities of wealth between villagers nor apparent long-lasting conflicts between villages. By sharing local knowledge, labor, and natural resources, this society succeeded both in limiting power and wealth concentration, and in sustainably producing food surpluses to be exchanged with neighboring populations. These results indicate a high degree of social cohesion and low levels of social and wealth inequality, similar to other well-established horticultural and agricultural societies around the world. We propose a conceptual model of low inequality in agrarian societies subject to extreme or unstable environments, where the sharing of knowledge, resources, and labor are the adaptive social responses to cope with the uncertainty in natural resources. The sustainability of the society is then guaranteed by a balance between collective action and family-based social organization.
In this paper, we propose a method to assess population numbers and quantify their vulnerability for listed plant species. For six study species, the spatial aggregation of point data allowed us to ...identify the numbers of populations for each species and thus how they differ in regional abundance. We assessed vulnerability by according a score to each population in relation to three criteria: (i) land-use (urbanisation, agriculture and natural areas), (ii) fragmentation of populations by infrastructures and (iii) protected status of populations. As a result of the combination and scoring of populations across the three criteria, only 9% have a low extinction risk and 73% are in one of the three classes of high vulnerability with 16% in the highest category. Finally, 29 of 32 populations monitored in a separate study are in one of the three highest categories of vulnerability. This study illustrates how information on population numbers of listed species at the regional scale brings to the fore their generalised vulnerability to threats in the Mediterranean landscape. This information is vital for conservation management staff to develop a strategy and appropriate actions for listed species’ protection.
Climate is one of the main factors driving species distributions and global biodiversity patterns. Obtaining accurate predictions of species’ range shifts in response to ongoing climate change has ...thus become a key issue in ecology and conservation. Correlative species distribution models (cSDMs) have become a prominent tool to this aim in the last decade and have demonstrated good predictive abilities with current conditions, irrespective of the studied taxon. However, cSDMs rely on statistical association between species’ presence and environmental conditions and have rarely been challenged on their actual capacity to reflect causal relationships between species and climate. In this study, we question whether cSDMs can accurately identify if climate and species distributions are causally linked, a prerequisite for accurate prediction of range shift in relation to climate change. We compared the performance of cSDMs in predicting the distributions of 132 European terrestrial species, chosen randomly within five taxonomic groups (three vertebrate groups and two plant groups), and of 1,320 virtual species whose distribution is causally fully independent from climate. We found that (1) for real species, the performance of cSDMs varied principally with range size, rather than with taxonomic groups and (2) cSDMs did not predict the distributions of real species with a greater accuracy than the virtual ones. Our results unambiguously show that the high predictive power of cSDMs can be driven by spatial autocorrelation in climatic and distributional data and does not necessarily reflect causal relationships between climate and species distributions. Thus, high predictive performance of cSDMs does not ensure that they accurately depict the role of climate in shaping species distributions. Our findings therefore call for strong caution when using cSDMs to provide predictions on future range shifts in response to climate change.
•Landscape affects biodiversity and evolution of Collembola communities.•Landscape diversity enhances Collembola community structure.•Woody landscapes support the diversification of ecological ...niches.•Environmental legacies and park management both affect Collembola communities.
By increasing landscape patchiness and habitat loss, urbanization threatens biodiversity. Its adverse effects may be mitigated by urban parks, in which conditions that promote structural and functional biodiversity contribute to preserve ecosystem processes. Therefore, deep knowledge of urban park biodiversity and of patterns driving species assemblages is required, especially for soil communities which are understudied. This study, conducted in public parks in Montpellier (Southern France), is the first one examining the impact of landscape patterns on Collembola communities. Moreover, soil abiotic properties were analyzed to examine how local factors drive species assemblages in different landscape types. The results of the study highlighted that Collembola community structure is affected by landscape patterns. Specifically, Collembola communities with species-abundance structures typical of late successional stages were found within woody landscapes, whereas those with early successional stage structures were observed in wide turf patches surrounded by other vegetation covers. When turf patches become small and isolated, homogenization was observed in Collembola community composition. From the perspective of urban park planning, managers should consider limiting landscape fragmentation (i.e. interspersion and configuration of impervious surfaces) and preserving landscape diversity (especially through woody vegetation patches). These may promote the development of diverse and structured Collembola communities, indicators of the overall soil quality.
Archaeology provides few examples of large-scale fisheries at the frontier between catching and farming of fish. We analysed the spatial organization of earthen embankments to infer the functioning ...of a landscape-level pre-Columbian Amazonian fishery that was based on capture of out-migrating fish after reproduction in seasonal floodplains. Long earthen weirs cross floodplains. We showed that weirs bear successive V-shaped features (termed 'Vs' for the sake of brevity) pointing downstream for outflowing water and that ponds are associated with Vs, the V often forming the pond's downstream wall. How Vs channelled fish into ponds cannot be explained simply by hydraulics, because Vs surprisingly lack fishways, where, in other weirs, traps capture fish borne by current flowing through these gaps. We suggest that when water was still high enough to flow over the weir, out-migrating bottom-hugging fish followed current downstream into Vs. Finding deeper, slower-moving water, they remained. Receding water further concentrated fish in ponds. The pond served as the trap, and this function shaped pond design. Weir-fishing and pond-fishing are both practiced in African floodplains today. In combining the two, this pre-Columbian system appears unique in the world.
•The geographical distribution of tabanid species in Europe is described.•The annual mean temperature positively affects tabanid diversity.•The percentage of pastureland negatively affects tabanid ...diversity and evenness.•The trapping method affects the community proportion of main tabanid species.•Implications for the epidemiology of tabanid-borne diseases are discussed.
Land use and climate are important drivers of the diversity and abundance of insects. Tabanids (Diptera: Tabanidae) are haematophagous cosmopolitan flies that are pests to humans and livestock as well as mechanical vectors of animal disease agents such as Besnoitia besnoiti and the equine infectious anaemia virus. Given growing concerns about tabanid-borne diseases in Europe, there is a need to assess how land use and climate affect tabanid assemblages on the European scale. To investigate this, we used a dataset including 38 tabanid samples from 7 European countries to determine the geographical distribution of 79 tabanid species, and a dataset restricted to 32 samples from 4 countries to examine the relationship between tabanid assemblages and climatic and land-use variables. We also investigated the impact of the sampling method on findings. On the European scale, a non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination revealed that tabanid assemblages were spatially ordered along a marked gradient from Eastern to Western Europe. A model-based analysis of the multivariate tabanid abundance data showed that both climatic and landscape variables, but not sampling method, had a significant additive effect on mean abundance. Using linear mixed-effects models, we found that the Shannon diversity index decreased from 2.5 to 0.5 when the percentage of pastureland in a 2-km buffer around the sampling site increased from 0 to 80% and the annual mean temperature decreased from 16 to 4°C, while Pielou’s measure of species evenness decreased from 0.94 to 0.18 with an increase in the percentage of pastureland. We found that the community proportion of the two most common European species, Tabanus bromius and Haematopota pluvialis, was significantly associated with the sampling method. Our results indicate that the distribution and incidence of tabanid-borne diseases may be heavily influenced by changes in land use and climate and highlight the importance of environmental changes on insect vector populations.
In high-altitude summer pastures, horseflies (Diptera: Tabanidae) can be a serious nuisance to livestock, as well as mechanical vectors of animal diseases such as besnoitiosis, an enzootic disease in ...the Pyrenees. However, the activity of horseflies in mountainous environments is poorly documented. To study the seasonality and distribution of tabanids in the Pyrenees Mountains, a sampling design was set up in two valleys on opposite sides of the mountain, one north-facing and one south-facing, along high-elevation gradients and at different distances from a water body between May and October 2011. The influence of the landscape on species richness and abundance was assessed by taking into account forested and unforested areas in 200 m radii around the trapping sites. Our findings indicated that: (1) The slope, the altitude and the size of unforested patches significantly influenced community composition of tabanids. (2) Altitude had a positive or a negative effect, depending on the species. (3) Species richness and abundance were negatively correlated with large open habitats and positively correlated with patch-shape complexity. (4) Seasonal succession of the most abundant species was observed in both valleys, with a maximum of catches at the beginning of August; however, tabanid activity ended earlier in the southern valley, which was more exposed to sunlight. (5) Philipomyia aprica, Tabanus bromius, Tabanus glaucopis and Hybomitra auripila were active from 9:00 to 19:00 h (GMT+1), with a peak of activity at midday. This paper also discusses the implications of these findings in relation to changes in horsefly distribution and their control in mountainous environments.
Archaeological research suggests significant human occupation in the arid Andean highlands during the 13th to 15th centuries, whereas paleoclimatic studies reveal prolonged drier and colder ...conditions during that period. Which subsistence strategy supported local societies in this harsh environment? Our field and aerial surveys of archaeological dwelling sites, granaries, and croplands provide the first evidence of extended pre-Hispanic agriculture supporting dense human populations in the arid Andes of Bolivia. This unique agricultural system associated with quinoa cultivation was unirrigated, consisting of simple yet extensive landscape modifications. It relied on highly specific environmental knowledge and a set of water-saving practices, including microterracing and biennial fallowing. This intense agricultural activity developed during a period of unfavorable climatic change on a regional and global scale, illustrative of efficient adaptive strategies to cope with this climatic change.
Investigations of urbanization effects on birds have focused mainly on breeding traits expressed after the nest-building stage (e.g. first-egg date, clutch size, breeding success, and offspring ...characteristics). Urban studies largely ignored how and why the aspects of nest building might be associated with the degree of urbanization. As urban environments are expected to present novel environmental changes relative to rural environments, it is important to evaluate how nest-building behavior is impacted by vegetation modifications associated with urbanization. To examine nest design in a Mediterranean city environment, we allowed urban great tits (
Parus major
) to breed in nest boxes in areas that differed in local vegetation cover. We found that different measures of nest size or mass were not associated with vegetation cover. In particular, nests located adjacent to streets with lower vegetation cover were not smaller or lighter than nests in parks with higher vegetation cover. Nests adjacent to streets contained more pine needles than nests in parks. In addition, in nests adjacent to streets, nests from boxes attached to pine trees contained more pine needles than nests from boxes attached to other trees. We suggest that urban-related alterations in vegetation cover do not directly impose physical limits on nest size in species that are opportunistic in the selection of nesting material. However, nest composition as reflected in the use of pine needles was clearly affected by habitat type and the planted tree species present, which implies that rapid habitat change impacts nest composition. We do not exclude that urbanization might impact other aspects of nest building behaviour not covered in our study (e.g. costs of searching for nest material), and that the strengths of the associations between urbanization and nest structures might differ among study populations or species.
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