Unsere Publikation Assessing spatial variability and efficacy of surrogate species at an ecosystem scale von Kristin Brunk, H. Kramer, M. Peery, Stefan Kahl und Connor Wood erscheint in der August-Ausgabe von Conservation Biology.
Abstract: Preserving biodiversity is a central goal of conservation, but, in practice, monitoring biodi-versity often involves assessing population trends for one or a handful of species that arepresumed proxies for biodiversity. Despite the popularity of surrogate species strategies,the links between biodiversity and surrogate species are rarely tested, especially across thebroad spatial scales at which they are applied. We quantitatively evaluated a prominentsurrogate species strategy across 25,000 km2 of California’s Sierra Nevada, an ecosys-tem undergoing substantial forest loss due to changing fire regimes and climate. We usedpassive acoustic monitoring and multispecies occupancy models to quantify pairwise co-occurrence among 6 indicator species and much of the avian community (63 species). Wefound that 95% of the sampled avian community had a positive association with at leastone indicator species and that latitude played an important role in shaping co-occurrencefor many species. Our work provides an important test of a long-standing conservationtool, suggests that a well-chosen suite of surrogate species can represent the occurrencepatterns of a large portion of the rest of the community, and demonstrates the importanceof explicitly considering the spatial scale over which surrogate species are effective.
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