Assessing spatial variability and efficacy of surrogate species at an ecosystem scale.

ABSTRACT: Preserving biodiversity is a central goal of conservation, but, in practice, monitoring biodiversity often involves assessing population trends for one or a handful of species that are presumed proxies for biodiversity. Despite the popularity of surrogate species strategies, the links between biodiversity and surrogate species are rarely tested, especially across the broad spatial scales at which they are applied. We quantitatively evaluated a prominent surrogate species strategy across 25,000 km² of California's Sierra Nevada, an ecosystem undergoing substantial forest loss due to changing fire regimes and climate. We used passive acoustic monitoring and multispecies occupancy models to quantify pairwise co-occurrence among 6 indicator species and much of the avian community (6

SUBMITTER: Brunk KM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12451493 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature