NSFDEB-NERC-Wildlife corridors: do they work and who benefits?

NSFDEB-NERC-野生动物走廊：它们有效吗？谁受益？

• 批准号: NE/T006935/1
• 负责人: James Bullock
• 金额: $ 53.58万
• 依托单位: UK CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY & HYDROLOGY
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FT006935%2F1
• 关键词: NSFDEB; NERC; Wildlife; corridors; do

Humans have modified over 75% of the global land area, leading to huge, negative impacts on biodiversity. A major consequence is that once large natural habitats have become fragmented into small islands of habitat within a sea of human-modified land such as farms and cities. Most species depend on dispersal (the movement of individuals from where they are born to a different location) to maintain healthy populations across landscapes. When their habitat becomes fragmented into small, isolated patches, species are often unable to disperse effectively between the remnant patches and this frequently results in population declines, loss of genetic diversity and local extinctions of species. Understanding how best to manage landscapes that are fragmented is a key challenge. One of the most promising responses to fragmentation is to conserve or restore wildlife corridors, i.e. swaths of natural habitat between otherwise isolated habitat patches to facilitate dispersal, gene flow, and population rescue. Indeed, corridor creation is at the core of national (e.g. England's 25 Year Environment Plan) and international (e.g. the UN's Connectivity Conservation Project) environmental policies. Many conservation and environment agencies (e.g., Natural England, the USA's 22 Landscape Conservation Cooperatives) are designing - and public and private conservation investors are implementing - wildlife corridors. Huge sums of money in direct expenses and foregone development opportunities are being invested in corridors. However, we lack an understanding of if such corridors work. Most of what is known about corridor efficacy comes from experiments on model systems that do not resemble real-world wildlife corridors. New studies are needed to address the crucial questions: do corridors counter real-world fragmentation; and what corridor characteristics constrain effectiveness? To address these questions, we need to do fundamental research into the ecology of species' dispersal over large-scales and within complex, human-modified landscapes. Existing experiments on corridors study the effects of corridors less than 0.5km long and less than 0.4km wide, much smaller than corridors in the real world. Our objective in this project is assess corridor effectiveness in a number of human-modified landscapes. We will address major knowledge gaps about the characteristics of effective corridors by studying 4-6 focal species in each of 20 landscapes in Europe and the Americas. Each of these 20 landscapes contains three types of habitat configurations: isolated habitat patches, pairs of patches connected by a corridor, and a large intact natural area. The landscapes are ideal because they vary in corridor widths (0.2-3km) and lengths (1-25km), which resembles the large scales at which habitat fragmentation and corridors are design in reality. Using genetic methods to assess how a variety of mammal species move in these different habitat configurations, we will identify whether mammals are able to use corridors at these large scales and which corridor characteristics (e.g. length, width) most strongly influence success. We will assess where and how unsuccessful corridors fail. We will also use novel analysis of species characteristics, such as body size, dispersal ability, brain size and reproductive rate, to identify which types of species are most likely to benefit from corridors and determine whether different types of species might require different types of corridors. Finally, we will use our new data in ecological models to test a range of methods for planning wildlife corridors, which will make the project useful to conservation managers globally. Our project will deliver vital new information on how to make wildlife corridors successful for a large variety of species, will bring new understanding into species dispersal over very large scales, and will provide new methods for determining where to best invest resources for conservation.

人类已经改变了全球75%以上的土地面积，对生物多样性产生了巨大的负面影响。一个主要的后果是，一旦大型自然栖息地被分割成小岛屿的栖息地在海洋人类改造的土地，如农场和城市。大多数物种依靠扩散（个体从出生地迁移到不同的地方）来维持整个景观的健康种群。当它们的栖息地被分割成小的、孤立的斑块时，物种往往无法在残留斑块之间有效地分散，这往往导致种群数量下降、遗传多样性丧失和物种的局部灭绝。了解如何最好地管理分散的景观是一个关键的挑战。对碎片化最有希望的反应之一是保护或恢复野生动物走廊，即在原本孤立的栖息地斑块之间的自然栖息地，以促进扩散，基因流动和种群拯救。事实上，走廊的创建是国家（如英格兰的25年环境计划）和国际（如联合国的连通性保护项目）环境政策的核心。许多保护和环境机构（例如，自然英格兰，美国的22个景观保护合作社）正在设计-和公共和私人保护投资者正在实施-野生动物走廊。巨额的直接费用和放弃的发展机会正在投资于走廊。然而，我们对这种走廊是否有效缺乏了解。大部分关于走廊功效的知识都来自于对与真实世界野生动物走廊不相似的模型系统的实验。需要新的研究来解决关键问题：走廊是否会对抗现实世界的碎片化;走廊的哪些特征会限制有效性？为了解决这些问题，我们需要对物种在大规模和复杂的人类改造景观中的扩散生态学进行基础研究。现有的走廊实验研究的是长度小于0.5公里、宽度小于0.4公里的走廊，比真实的世界中的走廊小得多。我们在这个项目中的目标是评估走廊的有效性，在一些人为修改的景观。我们将通过研究欧洲和美洲20个景观中的4-6个焦点物种来解决有关有效走廊特征的主要知识差距。这20个景观中的每一个都包含三种类型的栖息地配置：孤立的栖息地斑块，由走廊连接的斑块对，以及一个大的完整的自然区域。这些景观是理想的，因为它们在走廊宽度（0.2- 3公里）和长度（1- 25公里）上各不相同，这类似于现实中栖息地破碎化和走廊设计的大尺度。利用遗传学方法来评估各种哺乳动物物种如何在这些不同的栖息地配置中移动，我们将确定哺乳动物是否能够在这些大尺度上使用走廊，以及哪些走廊特征（例如长度，宽度）最强烈地影响成功。我们将评估不成功的走廊在哪里以及如何失败。我们还将使用新的物种特征分析，如身体大小，扩散能力，大脑大小和繁殖率，以确定哪些类型的物种最有可能受益于走廊，并确定不同类型的物种是否可能需要不同类型的走廊。最后，我们将在生态模型中使用我们的新数据来测试一系列规划野生动物走廊的方法，这将使该项目对全球保护管理人员有用。 我们的项目将提供关于如何使野生动物走廊成功用于各种物种的重要新信息，将在非常大的规模上对物种传播带来新的理解，并将提供新的方法来确定在哪里最好地投资资源进行保护。

项目成果

Dispersal evolution in currents: spatial sorting promotes philopatry in upstream patches

洋流中的扩散演化：空间排序促进了上游斑块的自由繁殖

• DOI: 10.1111/ecog.05315
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Ecography
• 影响因子: 5.9
• 作者: Allgayer R