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Beaudrot L, Acevedo MA, Gorczynski D, Harris NC. Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web connectance of tropical forest mammals. Sci Rep 2024; 14:6965. [PMID: 38521800 PMCID: PMC10960815 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-57500-5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/13/2023] [Accepted: 03/19/2024] [Indexed: 03/25/2024] Open
Abstract
Understanding variation in food web structure over large spatial scales is an emerging research agenda in food web ecology. The density of predator-prey links in a food web (i.e., connectance) is a key measure of network complexity that describes the mean proportional dietary breadth of species within a food web. Connectance is a critical component of food web robustness to species loss: food webs with lower connectance have been shown to be more susceptible to secondary extinctions. Identifying geographic variation in food web connectance and its drivers may provide insight into community robustness to species loss. We investigated the food web connectance of ground-dwelling tropical forest mammal communities in multiple biogeographic regions to test for differences among regions in food web connectance and to test three potential drivers: primary productivity, contemporary anthropogenic pressure, and variation in mammal body mass distributions reflective of historical extinctions. Mammal communities from fifteen protected forests throughout the Neo-, Afro-, and Asian tropics were identified from systematic camera trap arrays. Predator-prey interaction data were collected from published literature, and we calculated connectance for each community as the number of observed predator-prey links relative to the number of possible predator-prey links. We used generalized linear models to test for differences among regions and to identify the site level characteristics that best predicted connectance. We found that mammal food web connectance varied significantly among continents and that body size range was the only significant predictor. More possible predator-prey links were observed in communities with smaller ranges in body size and therefore sites with smaller body size ranges had higher mean proportional dietary breadth. Specifically, mammal communities in the Neotropics and in Madagascar had significantly higher connectance than mammal communities in Africa. This geographic variation in contemporary mammalian food web structure may be the product of historical extinctions in the Late Quaternary, which led to greater losses of large-bodied species in the Neotropics and Madagascar thus contributing to higher average proportional dietary breadth among the remaining smaller bodied species in these regions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lydia Beaudrot
- Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA.
- Department of Integrative Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA.
| | - Miguel A Acevedo
- Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
| | - Daniel Gorczynski
- Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
| | - Nyeema C Harris
- Applied Wildlife Ecology Lab, School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
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Lee SXT, Amir Z, Moore JH, Gaynor KM, Luskin MS. Effects of human disturbances on wildlife behaviour and consequences for predator-prey overlap in Southeast Asia. Nat Commun 2024; 15:1521. [PMID: 38374248 PMCID: PMC10876642 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45905-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/14/2023] [Accepted: 02/07/2024] [Indexed: 02/21/2024] Open
Abstract
Some animal species shift their activity towards increased nocturnality in disturbed habitats to avoid predominantly diurnal humans. This may alter diel overlap among species, a precondition to most predation and competition interactions that structure food webs. Here, using camera trap data from 10 tropical forest landscapes, we find that hyperdiverse Southeast Asian wildlife communities shift their peak activity from early mornings in intact habitats towards dawn and dusk in disturbed habitats (increased crepuscularity). Our results indicate that anthropogenic disturbances drive opposing behavioural adaptations based on rarity, size and feeding guild, with more nocturnality among the 59 rarer specialists' species, more diurnality for medium-sized generalists, and less diurnality for larger hunted species. Species turnover also played a role in underpinning community- and guild-level responses, with disturbances associated with markedly more detections of diurnal generalists and their medium-sized diurnal predators. However, overlap among predator-prey or competitor guilds does not vary with disturbance, suggesting that net species interactions may be conserved.
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Affiliation(s)
- Samuel Xin Tham Lee
- School of the Environment, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
| | - Zachary Amir
- School of the Environment, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
| | - Jonathan H Moore
- School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
- School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
| | - Kaitlyn M Gaynor
- Departments of Zoology and Botany, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
| | - Matthew Scott Luskin
- Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
- Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
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Semper-Pascual A, Sheil D, Beaudrot L, Dupont P, Dey S, Ahumada J, Akampurira E, Bitariho R, Espinosa S, Jansen PA, Lima MGM, Martin EH, Mugerwa B, Rovero F, Santos F, Uzabaho E, Bischof R. Occurrence dynamics of mammals in protected tropical forests respond to human presence and activities. Nat Ecol Evol 2023; 7:1092-1103. [PMID: 37365343 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02060-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/12/2022] [Accepted: 04/02/2023] [Indexed: 06/28/2023]
Abstract
Protected areas (PAs) play a vital role in wildlife conservation. Nonetheless there is concern and uncertainty regarding how and at what spatial scales anthropogenic stressors influence the occurrence dynamics of wildlife populations inside PAs. Here we assessed how anthropogenic stressors influence occurrence dynamics of 159 mammal species in 16 tropical PAs from three biogeographic regions. We quantified these relationships for species groups (habitat specialists and generalists) and individual species. We used long-term camera-trap data (1,002 sites) and fitted Bayesian dynamic multispecies occupancy models to estimate local colonization (the probability that a previously empty site is colonized) and local survival (the probability that an occupied site remains occupied). Multiple covariates at both the local scale and landscape scale influenced mammal occurrence dynamics, although responses differed among species groups. Colonization by specialists increased with local-scale forest cover when landscape-scale fragmentation was low. Survival probability of generalists was higher near the edge than in the core of the PA when landscape-scale human population density was low but the opposite occurred when population density was high. We conclude that mammal occurrence dynamics are impacted by anthropogenic stressors acting at multiple scales including outside the PA itself.
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Affiliation(s)
- Asunción Semper-Pascual
- Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway.
| | - Douglas Sheil
- Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway
- Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands
- Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia
| | - Lydia Beaudrot
- Program in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Department of BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
| | - Pierre Dupont
- Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway
| | - Soumen Dey
- Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway
| | - Jorge Ahumada
- Moore Center for Science, Conservation International, Arlington, VA, USA
| | - Emmanuel Akampurira
- Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Kabale, Uganda
- Conflict Research Group, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
| | - Robert Bitariho
- Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Kabale, Uganda
| | - Santiago Espinosa
- Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí, Mexico
- Escuela de Biología, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador
| | - Patrick A Jansen
- Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Ancon, Republic of Panama
- Wildlife Ecology & Conservation Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands
| | - Marcela Guimarães Moreira Lima
- Biogeography of Conservation and Macroecology Laboratory, Institute of Biological Sciences, Universidade Federal do Pará, Pará, Brazil
| | - Emanuel H Martin
- Department of Wildlife Management, College of African Wildlife Management, Mweka, Tanzania
| | - Badru Mugerwa
- Department of Ecological Dynamics, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany
- Faculty VI-Planning Building Environment, Institute of Ecology, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
| | - Francesco Rovero
- Department of Biology, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
- MUSE-Museo delle Scienze, Trento, Italy
| | | | | | - Richard Bischof
- Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway
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National parks and conservation concessions: a comparison between mammal populations in two types of tropical protected areas in Ucayali, Peru. JOURNAL OF TROPICAL ECOLOGY 2023. [DOI: 10.1017/s0266467422000414] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/12/2022]
Abstract
Abstract
Peru contains the second largest surface area of the Amazon biome. The Peruvian Amazon is threatened by logging, illegal crops, mining, and agricultural expansion. While a number of national parks exist in the Amazon region, privately managed areas like Conservation Concessions can be an attractive complement to existing parks. We compare medium and large mammal communities in a Conservation Concession in Ucayali with the nearby Parque Nacional Sierra del Divisor National Park and describe species relative abundance and richness of both protected areas. Results suggest that Conservation Concessions can harbour an important diversity of mammal species and could provide connections to larger protected areas. However, they are no substitutes for large protected areas, especially for sensitive and threatened species. Further research is needed to demonstrate their complementarity and improve landscape-level connectivity between conservation models.
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