Tracking spatial regimes as an early warning for a species of conservation concern.

ABSTRACT: In this era of global environmental change and rapid regime shifts, managing core areas that species require to survive and persist is a grand challenge for conservation. Wildlife monitoring data are often limited or local in scale. The emerging ability to map and track spatial regimes (i.e., the spatial manifestation of state transitions) using advanced geospatial vegetation data has the potential to provide earlier warnings of habitat loss because many species of conservation concern strongly avoid spatial regime boundaries. Using 23 yr of data for the lek locations of Greater Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido; GPC) in a remnant grassland ecosystem, we demonstrate how mapping changes in the boundaries between grassland and woodland spatial regimes provide a spatially explicit early war

SUBMITTER: Roberts CP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9746655 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature