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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
Are We Capturing Faunal Intactness? A Comparison of Intact Forest Landscapes and the “Last of the Wild in Each Ecoregion”
Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, Volume 2, Article 24, Year 2019
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Description
Efforts to designate priority areas for conservation have had a long history, with most modern initiatives focused on either designating areas important for biodiversity or those least impacted by direct human disturbance. Ecologically intact ecosystems are becoming increasingly limited on the planet, making their identification and conservation an important priority. Intact forest landscapes (IFL) are defined as forests that are mainly free of significant anthropogenic degradation and at least 500 km2 in size. Here we define a new metric, the Last of the Wild in each Ecoregion (LWE), as a preliminary scoping of the most intact parts of each ecoregion. IFL and LWE are approaches among a broad family of techniques to mapping ecological integrity at the global scale. Although both implicitly include species integrity as a dimension of intactness, this is inferred rather than directly measured. We assessed whether IFL or LWE areas were better at capturing species where they are most abundant using species distribution data for a set of forest species for which range-wide data were available and human activity limits the range. We found that IFL and LWE methods identified areas where species we assessed are either absent or at too low an abundance to be ecologically functional. As such many IFL/LWE polygons did not have intact fauna. We also show that 54.7% of the terrestrial realm (excluding Antarctica) has at least one species recorded as extinct and that two thirds of IFL/LWE areas overlap with areas where species have gone extinct in the past 500 years. The results show that even within the most remote areas, serious faunal loss has taken place at many localities so direct species survey work is also needed to confirm faunal intactness. © Copyright © 2019 Plumptre, Baisero, Jędrzejewski, Kühl, Maisels, Ray, Sanderson, Strindberg, Voigt and Wich.
Authors & Co-Authors
Plumptre, Andrew J.
United Kingdom, Cambridge
Birdlife International
United Kingdom, Cambridge
University of Cambridge
Baisero, Daniele
United Kingdom, Cambridge
Birdlife International
United States, New York
Wildlife Conservation Society
Jȩdrzejewski, Wlodzimierz
Venezuela, Altos de Pipe
Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas
Kühl, Hjalmar S.
Germany, Leipzig
Max-planck-institut Für Evolutionäre Anthropologie
Germany, Leipzig
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Idiv Halle-jena-leipzig
Maisels, Fiona G.
United States, New York
Wildlife Conservation Society
United Kingdom, Stirling
University of Stirling
Sanderson, Eric W.
United States, New York
Wildlife Conservation Society
Strindberg, Samantha
United States, New York
Wildlife Conservation Society
Voigt, Maria
Germany, Leipzig
Max-planck-institut Für Evolutionäre Anthropologie
Germany, Leipzig
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Idiv Halle-jena-leipzig
Wich, Serge A.
United Kingdom, Liverpool
Liverpool John Moores University
Netherlands, Amsterdam
Universiteit Van Amsterdam
Statistics
Citations: 16
Authors: 9
Affiliations: 9
Identifiers
Doi:
10.3389/ffgc.2019.00024
ISSN:
2624893X
Study Design
Cross Sectional Study
Study Approach
Quantitative