Herpetofauna inside and outside from a natural protected area: the case of Reserva Estatal de la Biósfera Sierra San Juan, Nayarit, Mexico

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Abstract

Natural Protected Areas (NPAs) includes important species richness, and it is assumed that these are the best areas for biodiversity conservation. There are certain doubts, however, about the effectiveness of the NPAs in developing countries, where economic resources for conservation are scarce and NPAs are not monitored and managed efficiently. In the present study we assessed the species richness, diversity, abundance, and functional guilds of amphibians and reptiles inside and outside of the NPA Reserva Estatal de la Biósfera Sierra San Juan (REBSSJ), Nayarit, Mexico. Our results showed that species numbers of amphibian and reptiles were higher outside than inside the reserve, as well the individual number distributed among species, except for lizard species. Analyses of functional guilds showed that both richness and functional dispersion were greater in amphibians and reptiles outside the reserve. Likewise, outside the reserve we recorded a higher species number with some category of risk at the national level (NOM-059), international level (IUCN), and also by using the Environmental Vulnerability Score (EVS) algorithm. The results suggest that areas outside of the reserve are crucial to the maintenance of regional biodiversity, due to high complementarity with species composition inside of the reserves. These data can be used to implement conservation measures that include a new demarcation of the reserve and the consideration of surrounding areas to include a great number of species.

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Most cited references 31

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Quantifying biodiversity: procedures and pitfalls in the measurement and comparison of species richness

Nicholas Gotelli, Robert K. Colwell (2001)

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New multidimensional functional diversity indices for a multifaceted framework in functional ecology.

Sébastien Villéger, Norman W H Mason, David Mouillot (2008)

Functional diversity is increasingly identified as an important driver of ecosystem functioning. Various indices have been proposed to measure the functional diversity of a community, but there is still no consensus on which are most suitable. Indeed, none of the existing indices meets all the criteria required for general use. The main criteria are that they must be designed to deal with several traits, take into account abundances, and measure all the facets of functional diversity. Here we propose three indices to quantify each facet of functional diversity for a community with species distributed in a multidimensional functional space: functional richness (volume of the functional space occupied by the community), functional evenness (regularity of the distribution of abundance in this volume), and functional divergence (divergence in the distribution of abundance in this volume). Functional richness is estimated using the existing convex hull volume index. The new functional evenness index is based on the minimum spanning tree which links all the species in the multidimensional functional space. Then this new index quantifies the regularity with which species abundances are distributed along the spanning tree. Functional divergence is measured using a novel index which quantifies how species diverge in their distances (weighted by their abundance) from the center of gravity in the functional space. We show that none of the indices meets all the criteria required for a functional diversity index, but instead we show that the set of three complementary indices meets these criteria. Through simulations of artificial data sets, we demonstrate that functional divergence and functional evenness are independent of species richness and that the three functional diversity indices are independent of each other. Overall, our study suggests that decomposition of functional diversity into its three primary components provides a meaningful framework for its quantification and for the classification of existing functional diversity indices. This decomposition has the potential to shed light on the role of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning and on the influence of biotic and abiotic filters on the structure of species communities. Finally, we propose a general framework for applying these three functional diversity indices.

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A distance-based framework for measuring functional diversity from multiple traits

Pierre Legendre, Etienne Laliberté (2010)

A new framework for measuring functional diversity (FD) from multiple traits has recently been proposed. This framework was mostly limited to quantitative traits without missing values and to situations in which there are more species than traits, although the authors had suggested a way to extend their framework to other trait types. The main purpose of this note is to further develop this suggestion. We describe a highly flexible distance-based framework to measure different facets of FD in multidimensional trait space from any distance or dissimilarity measure, any number of traits, and from different trait types (i.e., quantitative, semi-quantitative, and qualitative). This new approach allows for missing trait values and the weighting of individual traits. We also present a new multidimensional FD index, called functional dispersion (FDis), which is closely related to Rao's quadratic entropy. FDis is the multivariate analogue of the weighted mean absolute deviation (MAD), in which the weights are species relative abundances. For unweighted presence-absence data, FDis can be used for a formal statistical test of differences in FD. We provide the "FD" R language package to easily implement our distance-based FD framework.