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Society for Conservation Biology: 2002 Annual Meeting

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Society for Conservation Biology: 2002 Annual Meeting

Society for Conservation Biology 16th Annual Meeting July 14-July 19 2002
co-hosted by DICE and the British Ecological Society


Abstracts for Landscape Ecology
Session Two

Wednesday 17th July, 10.15 - 12.15, Grimond Lecture Theatre 2

Chair: Eric Sanderson




(BLOCK CAPITALS indicate the presenting author)

10.15 - 10.30
NEWTON, JULIANNE. Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, <Julianne.L.Newton@Valley.Net>.

IMAGINING LAND HEALTH

Throughout his career, Aldo Leopold was an ardent reformer, out to change not just land-use practices, but people: how they saw land, how they valued it, and how they understood their links to it. Leopold recognised that hunters wanted more game, yet his chief conservation aim was not to satisfy existing wants. In Game Management (1933) Leopold pushed readers to understand wild species as crops, which sound management could increase. In ensuing years, he encouraged readers to broaden their wildlife concerns, to cover predators and threatened species. During his final decade, Leopold’s thoughts shifted significantly, both in the aims of wildlife management and in the ways conservationists needed to reform society. Wildlife management became merely one tool in the pursuit of the overall conservation aim that Leopold termed "land health"-- a complex blend of science, utility, ethics, and aesthetics. Yet land health could be achieved, he recognised, only if fundamental changes occurred in the ways people imagined land and their place in it. By 1948, Leopold’s reform impulse had taken on a well-honed form, and wildlife management had become not just a way of improving land, but a way of improving people.

10.30 - 10.45
VÁZQUEZ, MIGUEL A., Diego Almeida, Fernando Nogales, Tatiana Santander, Elisa Bonaccorso, Juan F. Freile, Carlos Boada, Hernando Román, Carolina Chiriboga, Karen Andrade, and Zhofre Aguirre. EcoCiencia, Isla San Cristóbal N44-495. Quito, Ecuador, <manejo@ecociencia.org>.

THE LAST DRY FOREST OF A MEGADIVERSITY COUNTRY: BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC APPROACH

Dry forests of the Tumbesian Region of Ecuador are well-known because of their endemism, but also because of their rapid anthropogenic devastation. The percentage of remnant forests remaining as calculated by Sierra (1999), is alarming but even it is bigger than the 1% given by Dodson and Gentry (1989). In order to propose conservation actions, we developed socioeconomic rural appraisals and rapid ecological evaluations during 2000 and 2001, in two poorly known areas of southwestern Ecuador. Results showed the existence of important extensions of natural vegetation, a rich fauna, and a decreasing human population that consider nature in a utilitarian way. Apparently, former risk of war with Peru, bad roads and the existence of big farms contributed to the conservation of these forests. Unfortunately, governmental plans are promoting economic development in the zone, where no protected areas exist (these ecosystems are among the less represented at the Protected Areas National System). Thus, it is necessary to consider creation of new reserves, and to develop strategies to improve the use of lands, promote education, training and research. Information generated has already served to start conservation actions, but still there is a long way to go to protect the last dry forest of this megadiversity country.



10.45 - 11.00
HOARE, RICHARD P O Box A222, Avondale, Harare, Zimbabwe. <rhoare@mango.zw>

COMPRESSION OF SAVANNA ELEPHANT HOME RANGE DUE TO AGRICULTURAL EXPANSION

In the many African elephant populations still occurring outside protected areas, transformation of natural land cover for agriculture directly affects the size of elephant range. Compression of elephant population ranges is widely reported in literature but because of study difficulties no attempts have been made to adequately document or quantify a compression process, or its possible effects on the biology of the species. If compression could be better understood and even crudely quantified at the individual home range level, this would help to answer one of the most currently pressing questions in the conservation of the species — namely, how large must patches of natural habitat be in order to retain elephants? The 'downstream benefits' to conservation from adequately protecting ranges of such a keystone species in African savannas are acknowledged to be enormous. From different radio-tracking studies spanning two decades in a semi-arid ecosystem in Zimbabwe, measurements were able to broadly quantify the extent of elephant home range compression and show differences in susceptibility of the sexes to anthropogenic disturbance. This paper discusses ways of inferring minimum sizes of habitat patches required for retaining savanna elephants alongside predominantly human land uses.



11.00 - 11.15
OLUPOT, WILLIAM, Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation, P.O. Box 44, Kabale, Uganda, <itfc@infocom.co.ug>.

EDGE EFFECTS IN BWINDI IMPENETRABLE NATIONAL PARK, UGANDA

Edge effects, physical and biological phenomena associated with habitat margins, have been implicated in species disappearances and population declines. Yet few, if any such studies have been expressly designed to address questions of immediate management concern. This study is ongoing in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, which is re-known for its exceptional species diversity, high rates of endemism, and as home to a half of the global mountain gorilla population. It is set in an area with a high density of rural human populations. The park edge is mostly an abrupt transition from forest to crop or grazing land. This project is documenting human activity at the edge of the park and attempts to determine how the direct effects of human activity at the edge and the indirect effects of an abrupt edge combine to influence forest structure and distribution of plant and animal species. Sampling is conducted along 100m and 1000m linear edge-interior transects and non-linear transects running along the entire park boundary. Preliminary results indicate that illegal resource harvest does occur along a declining gradient from the edge to the interior and that anthropogenic effects may be more important in creation of edge habitat than variation in physical environmental factors.



11.15 - 11.30
WIKRAMANAYAKE, ERIC, Meghan McKnight, Eric Dinerstein, and Anup Joshi. Conservation Science Program, World Wildlife Fund - United States, 1250, Twenty-Fourth St. NW, Washington D.C. 20037, USA, <Eric.Wikramanayake@WWFUS.ORG>, (EW, MM, ED), Department of Fisheries & Wildlife, University of Minnesota, 1980 Folwell Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA (AJ).

THE TIGER IN THE TERAI: USING THE ECOLOGY OF UMBRELLA SPECIES TO PLAN CONSERVATION LANDSCAPES

Large, wide-ranging species are considered to be suitable surrogates and ‘umbrellas’ for conservation planning. We used the ecological requirements of Asia’s largest predator, the tiger, Panthera tigris, to design a conservation landscape–known as the Terai Arc–along the Himalayan foothills in Nepal and India. We modelled habitat linkages among the 12 protected areas in the landscape using remote sensing and GIS analysis. Broad habitat types and block size, and elevation were combined to create a cost grid of likelihood of tiger use. The best possible system of corridors between core refuges that harbour tiger populations were identified using a cost-distance analysis. We then conducted finer-scale modelling to locate strategic dispersal nodes that improve the potential of corridors for use by distantly separated tiger subpopulations. We identified 11 potential corridors for tiger dispersal. Among these, 6 corridors had high potential for tiger dispersal, and tiger presence has been confirmed by field observations. Five corridors that connected the most distant subpopulations had greater dispersal costs, but strategically placed dispersal nodes greatly improved the quality of these corridors for dispersal potential. This analysis shows how the ecology and metapopulation management of wide-ranging species can be used to design large conservation landscapes.



11.30 - 11.45
SHRESTHA, MAHENDRA K., James L. D. Smith. Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota, 200 Hodson Hall, 1980 Folwell Ave., St. Paul, MN 55108, USA, <mks@fw.umn.edu>, Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, P.O. Box 860, Kathmandu, Nepal (MKS).

LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS OF TIGER AND ITS PREY BASE DISTRIBUTION IN LOWLANDS OF NEPAL

Tiger distribution in Nepal is restricted to small and isolated protected areas attributed to extensive loss of habitat. Existing reserves are not large enough to maintain viable tiger populations. Restoration of degraded forestlands outside reserves is critical. We report on the distribution of tigers in Nepal in relation to prey abundance and habitat quality. We have identified gaps and potential habitats to preserve and expand effective land base that supports tiger. Tiger distribution (presence/absence) was determined by pug marks or any other sign in potential tiger habitats supplemented by information from local people. A total of 700, 625 m long transect lines, each consisting of 25, 10 m2 circular plots were examined for pellet groups of tiger prey species. Human disturbance level and habitat quality was estimated visually during the transect studies. Adjacency to reserve, forest patch size, prey abundance, habitat quality, and human disturbance were determining factors for the occurrence of tiger. Connecting link to a reserve (source) was the key for occurrence of tiger in other areas (sink). Estimates of potential tiger habitats and tiger occurrence outside reserves call for expanding the current management beyond protected areas focusing on dispersal corridors for metapopulation management.



11.45 - 12.00
MCSHEA, WILLIAM, and Kevin Koy. National Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center, Smithsonian Institution, 1500 Remount Rd., Front Royal, VA 22630, USA, <wmcshea@crc.si.edu>, <koykev@crc.si.edu> (WM, KK).

DETERMINING THE EXTENT OF REMAINING HABITAT SUITABLE FOR ELD’S DEER IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Eld’s deer, Cervus eldi, are an endangered cervid whose abundance in Southeast Asia has declined precipitously since the 1970's. Ecological studies in central Myanmar have determined that two forest types, both composed primarily of deciduous dipterocarps, are used extensively by this species. These forest types are characterized by an open canopy and an extensive grass and forb understory. Their low percentage canopy cover (15-45%) makes these forest types difficult to classify using satellite imagery because it is often confused with agricultural areas. We developed a two-staged approach of using existing data to delineate potential areas and then a regression tree model incorporating percentage canopy cover with NDVI and multispectral band values derived from Landsat ETM+ imagery to identify the forest types within potential areas. We created a habitat suitability model for a region of Myanmar where we have extensive ground-truthing data and extrapolated the results to other regions of the deer’s previous range. We estimate 97,966 km2 of suitable forest for Eld’s deer in Southeast Asia, with the most habitat in Myanmar, and the least in Laos and Cambodia. The present coverage of parks and reserves protects < 5% of this total, with the largest amount and percentage of forest protected in Cambodia.



12.00 - 12.15
SANDERSON, ERIC W., Malanding Jaiteh, Marc Levy, Kent H. Redford, Antoinette Wannebo, and Gillian Woolmer. Wildlife Conservation Society, 2300 Southern Blvd., Bronx, NY 10460, USA, <esanderson@wcs.org > (EWS, KHR, GW). Center for International Earth Science Information, 61 Route 9W, Palisades, NY 10964, USA (MJ, ML, AW).

THE HUMAN FOOTPRINT AND THE LAST OF THE WILD

Human influence is driving conservation crises on a global scale. Formerly, it was difficult to visualise this influence across the entire planet, but recent advances in the quality of global geographic data now allow us to systematically measure human influence on the land’s surface. We used a series of geographic overlays representing human land uses, power infrastructure, settlements, roads and other access points and human population density to map the "human footprint" on the land’s surface. Analysis of the human footprint indicates that 83% of the land’s surface is directly influenced by human agency. It is within the remaining 17% of the land’s surface that some of the best remaining opportunities for conservation lie. We located 568 "last of the wild" places as targets for conservation action. Although these wild places vary enormously in their biological productivity and diversity, they represent the least influenced or "wildest" areas in each of their respective biomes on each continent. As such they provide a promising opportunity to conserve wildlife and wild places while minimising conflicts with pre-existing human structures and demands. Meanwhile conservation science must find solutions across the gradient of human influence in order for conservation to succeed.