0000000001325286
AUTHOR
Manuela Gonzalez-suarez
Who and where: predicting road mortality risks using trait models
Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a major cause of mortality for many species. Empirical estimates of road mortality show that some species are more likely to be killed than others but to what extend this variation can be explained and predicted using intrinsic characteristics remains poorly understood. This study aims to identify general patterns associated to road mortality and generate spatial and species-level predictions of risks. We fitted trait-based random forest regression models (controlling for survey characteristics) to explain 783 empirical road mortality rates from Brazil, representing 170 bird and 73 mammalian species. Fitted models were then used to make spatial and species-le…
The zoogeographical domains: a new conservation target at global scale
Zooregions are classifications of the Earth’s surface based on characteristic species assemblages. Consequently, zooregions reflect how ecological, evolutionary, and historical processes have been acting over millions of years, arguably making them the largest entities to conserve the uniqueness of the species assemblages on Earth. Because species are distributed along zooregions heterogeneously, to conserve zooregions adequately, we need to protect their characteristic areas (transition, core or endemic areas), what we call the zoogeographical domains. Here we propose a method to characterize the zoogeographical domains basing on four metrics, which are independently used in macroecologica…
Trajectory analyses of past human land use as a tool to understand present terrestrial mammals' distribution
Apart from the known environmental factors influencing species distribution at the global scale, additional anthropogenic factors need to be considered in order to understand their current extents of occurrence. Namely, threatened species should particularly be influenced by human activities, since they are known to be in decline under their influence. The role of present human activities in modeling species distribution seems clear, but there is still a facet of land use that has not yet been sufficiently explored: land-use history. In the present work we show how to summarize overall land-use trajectories based on available data ranging from c.B.C.6000 to c.A.D.2000 by using a clustering …