The allometry of movement predicts the connectivity of communities.

ABSTRACT: Connectivity has long played a central role in ecological and evolutionary theory and is increasingly emphasized for conserving biodiversity. Nonetheless, connectivity assessments often focus on individual species even though understanding and preserving connectivity for entire communities is urgently needed. Here we derive and test a framework that harnesses the well-known allometric scaling of animal movement to predict community-level connectivity across protected area networks. We used a field translocation experiment involving 39 species of southern African birds to quantify movement capacity, scaled this relationship to realized dispersal distances determined from ring-and-recovery banding data, and used allometric scaling equations to quantify community-level connectivity based on m

SUBMITTER: Hartfelder J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7486732 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature