We discussed this paper in our journal club in late September 2011. In short, the paper looks at potential deforestation scenarios projected for the Amazon basin, evaluates how the projected deforestation rates drive future population declines of birds and then re-estimates the threat categories of species based on IUCN Red List criteria. Species richness of the “soon to be threatened” species are then put on map and compared with the projected spatial patterns of deforestation and current reserve networks. This way the authors identify i) currently important areas that have high number of species that are going to become threatened by future forest loss, ii) “crisis areas”, i.e. areas that are going to be deforested and have high richness of future threatened species, iii) “refugia”, i.e. areas with high species richness that will remain intact also in the future, and iv) irreplaceable sites of future threatened species. The authors then report gaps in the current reserve network and point out recommendations for future conservation actions.
Getting the first step right in modelling future species distributions
Owing to our recent interest in different approaches to modelling extinction risk, and because climate change impacts on biodiversity and conservation is always one of our key interests, we discussed a paper by Barbet-Massin et al. (2010). The authors state that considering the full range of a species is essential for modelling future climatic suitability within a region of interest. For evidence, they provide a comparison of using species occurrence data only within Europe versus considering the full Western Palearctic region. The loss of climatic suitability is decreased when the input data for modelling consists of a larger area. The authors show that extending the geographical space also tends to extend the environmental space which is suitable for the species according to the input data, which makes it more likely for a species to maintain suitable climate space in the course of climate change. Continue reading
Raising the bar – too high?
Work done under the broad umbrella term of systematic conservation planning (SCP) has a lot to deliver. In the face of accelerating biodiversity crisis the original SCP concept has been applied and augmented with computational tools that hold a promise of more cost-efficient – and indeed more efficient – conservation while keeping the process transparent and understandable for manager and policy-makers alike. But anyone who as ever worked with real-life conservation problem knows all too well that nagging feeling of “what if we got it wrong”? Working with heterogeneous sets of input data, empirical and/or modeled, seems to be the norm and the massive uncertainties involved are rarely quantified let alone reported. This needs to change. Or at least that is what Langford et. al (2011) think in a very recent opinion paper “Raising the bar for systematic conservation planning” published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and since the topic is very important for many members of our journal club we spent this Friday’s session discussing the paper – with pulla as always.