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      The Potential Connectivity of Waterhole Networks and the Effectiveness of a Protected Area under Various Drought Scenarios

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          Abstract

          Landscape connectivity is considered a priority for ecosystem conservation because it may mitigate the synergistic effects of climate change and habitat loss. Climate change predictions suggest changes in precipitation regimes, which will affect the availability of water resources, with potential consequences for landscape connectivity. The Greater Calakmul Region of the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico) has experienced a 16% decrease in precipitation over the last 50 years, which we hypothesise has affected water resource connectivity. We used a network model of connectivity, for three large endangered species (Baird’s tapir, white-lipped peccary and jaguar), to assess the effect of drought on waterhole availability and connectivity in a forested landscape inside and adjacent to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. We used reported travel distances and home ranges for our species to establish movement distances in our model. Specifically, we compared the effects of 10 drought scenarios on the number of waterholes (nodes) and the subsequent changes in network structure and node importance. Our analysis revealed that drought dramatically influenced spatial structure and potential connectivity of the network. Our results show that waterhole connectivity and suitable habitat (area surrounding waterholes) is lost faster inside than outside the reserve for all three study species, an outcome that may drive them outside the reserve boundaries. These results emphasize the need to assess how the variability in the availability of seasonal water resource may affect the viability of animal populations under current climate change inside and outside protected areas.

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          Ecological mechanisms linking protected areas to surrounding lands.

          Land use is expanding and intensifying in the unprotected lands surrounding many of the world's protected areas. The influence of this land use change on ecological processes is poorly understood. The goal of this paper is to draw on ecological theory to provide a synthetic framework for understanding how land use change around protected areas may alter ecological processes and biodiversity within protected areas and to provide a basis for identifying scientifically based management alternatives. We first present a conceptual model of protected areas embedded within larger ecosystems that often include surrounding human land use. Drawing on case studies in this Invited Feature, we then explore a comprehensive set of ecological mechanisms by which land use on surrounding lands may influence ecological processes and biodiversity within reserves. These mechanisms involve changes in ecosystem size, with implications for minimum dynamic area, species-area effect, and trophic structure; altered flows of materials and disturbances into and out of reserves; effects on crucial habitats for seasonal and migration movements and population source/sink dynamics; and exposure to humans through hunting, poaching, exotics species, and disease. These ecological mechanisms provide a basis for assessing the vulnerability of protected areas to land use. They also suggest criteria for designing regional management to sustain protected areas in the context of surrounding human land use. These design criteria include maximizing the area of functional habitats, identifying and maintaining ecological process zones, maintaining key migration and source habitats, and managing human proximity and edge effects.
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            Critical thresholds associated with habitat loss: a review of the concepts, evidence, and applications.

            A major conservation concern is whether population size and other ecological variables change linearly with habitat loss, or whether they suddenly decline more rapidly below a "critical threshold" level of habitat. The most commonly discussed explanation for critical threshold responses to habitat loss focus on habitat configuration. As habitat loss progresses, the remaining habitat is increasingly fragmented or the fragments are increasingly isolated, which may compound the effects of habitat loss. In this review we also explore other possible explanations for apparently nonlinear relationships between habitat loss and ecological responses, including Allee effects and time lags, and point out that some ecological variables will inherently respond nonlinearly to habitat loss even in the absence of compounding factors. In the literature, both linear and nonlinear ecological responses to habitat loss are evident among simulation and empirical studies, although the presence and value of critical thresholds is influenced by characteristics of the species (e.g. dispersal, reproduction, area/edge sensitivity) and landscape (e.g. fragmentation, matrix quality, rate of change). With enough empirical support, such trends could be useful for making important predictions about species' responses to habitat loss, to guide future research on the underlying causes of critical thresholds, and to make better informed management decisions. Some have seen critical thresholds as a means of identifying conservation targets for habitat retention. We argue that in many cases this may be misguided, and that the meaning (and utility) of a critical threshold must be interpreted carefully and in relation to the response variable and management goal. Despite recent interest in critical threshold responses to habitat loss, most studies have not used any formal statistical methods to identify their presence or value. Methods that have been used include model comparisons using Akaike information criterion (AIC) or t-tests, and significance testing for changes in slope or for polynomial effects. The judicious use of statistics to help determine the shape of ecological relationships would permit greater objectivity and more comparability among studies.
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              Land change in the southern Yucatán and Calakmul biosphere reserve: effects on habitat and biodiversity.

              The southern Yucatán contains the largest expanse of seasonal tropical forests remaining in Mexico, forming an ecocline between the drier north of the peninsula and the humid Petén, Guatemala. The Calakmul Biosphere Reserve resides in the center of this region as part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. The reserve's functions are examined in regard to land changes throughout the region, generated over the last 40 years by increasing settlement and the expansion and intensification of agriculture. These changes are documented from 1987/1988 to 2000, and their implications regarding the capacity of the reserve to protect the ecocline, forest habitats, and butterfly diversity are addressed. The results indicate that the current landscape matrix serves the biotic diversity of the reserve, with several looming caveats involving the loss of humid forests and the interruption of biota flow across the ecocline, and the amount and proximity of older forest patches beyond the reserve. The highly dynamic land cover changes underway in this economic frontier warrant an adaptive management approach that monitors the major changes underway in mature forest types, while the paucity of systematic ecological and environment-development studies is rectified in order to inform policy and practice.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2014
                15 May 2014
                : 9
                : 5
                : e95049
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
                [2 ]Biology Department, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
                [3 ]Département de géomatique (KGS), Département de biologie (SC), Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada
                [4 ]Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
                [5 ]Departamento de conservación de la biodiversidad, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico
                [6 ]Geography Department, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
                Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, France
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Analyzed the data: GO KGS BR. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: KGS OB RS AG. Wrote the paper: GO. Manuscript editing: BR SC RS AG.

                Article
                PONE-D-13-43686
                10.1371/journal.pone.0095049
                4022619
                24830392
                e6e98365-834a-4026-93d6-0067117ef372
                Copyright @ 2014

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 25 October 2013
                : 23 March 2014
                Page count
                Pages: 10
                Funding
                This study was carried out with the support of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia-Mexico (CONACYT- doctoral fellowship) and Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies (FQRNT- postdoctoral fellowship) to GO, the National Science and Engineering Research Council from Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants program to AG and RS, the Canada Research Chair Program (to AG), the Global Environmental and Climate Change Center (GEC3), the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA), the strategic research program Ekoklim at Stockholm University, and the NASA-LCLUC program(NAG5-6046 and NAG5-11134) to the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region(SYPR) project. The Walter Hitschfeld Geographic Information Centre in the Geography Department at McGill University provided the authors with the Quick Bird images. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Computational Biology
                Ecosystem Modeling
                Ecology
                Community Ecology
                Ecological Risk
                Ecosystems
                Ecosystem Functioning
                Biodiversity
                Global Change Ecology
                Spatial and Landscape Ecology
                Terrestrial Ecology
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Conservation Science

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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