CT5 Conservation Biogeography Short Lecture Series

Werner Ulrich (CT5.2) has developed a new method of estimating abundance of species in a community by assessing the factor of competition between individual species.

Laura Kehoe (CT5.3) discussed Land Use Intensity as compared with biodiversity in a very interesting talk, which showed globally, the areas which specifically compare land with high anthropogenic use that is adjacent to natural areas of high biodiversity. These high biodiversity to land use regions were found to be dominantly in the tropics: Central America, SE Asia and parts of Central Africa; regions with currently high levels of deforestation. But also found within Southern America, Sth Africa and parts of Australia. Significant areas with this high level of land clash lie outside Conservation Internation Biodiversity Hotspots.

Jenny McGuire (CT5.4) modelled the potential movement of animals over negative temperature gradients (due to climate change) finding worryingly that only 22% of landscape patches within her USA model had enough interconnectivity for successful movement. This is due to anthropogenic land use changes, fragmenting the landscape, very high in the agriculturally-rich eastern USA. Including climate corridors in the models connected and improved this potential movement between landscape patches greatly. How well will seemingly narrow vegetation corridors work in reality?

Carston (CT5.5) gave a thorough account of gaps within current global animal research data, including methods and abilities to track and calculate ranges of mammals. He showed that prioritization of data mobilisation is necessary because data is heavily biased to Western research organisations and completeness in overall data gaps would be significantly improved by finding local data sources.

Ricardo Dobrovolski (CT5.6) showed us that habitat amount determines the extinction risk threshold on a macro-logical scale, for the individual and community level . These risk factors should be compiled and expanded upon in the future to b used in conjunction with global climate change models.