Resilient landscapes have helped maintain terrestrial biodiversity during periods of climatic and environmental change. Identifying the tempo and mode of landscape transitions and the drivers of landscape resilience is critical to maintaining natural systems and preserving biodiversity given today's rapid climate and land use changes. However, resilient landscapes are difficult to recognize on short time scales, as perturbations are challenging to quantify and ecosystem transitions are rare. Here we analyze two components of North American landscape resilience over 20,000 years: residence time and recovery time. To evaluate landscape dynamics, we use plant biomes, preserved in the fossil pollen record, to examine how long a biome type persists at a given site (residence time) and how long it takes for the biome at that site to reestablish following a transition (recovery time). Biomes have a median residence time of only 230–460 years. Only 64% of biomes recover their original biome type, but recovery time is 140–290 years. Temperatures changing faster than 0.5°C per 500 years result in much reduced residence times. Following a transition, biodiverse biomes reestablish more quickly. Landscape resilience varies through time. Notably, short residence times and long recovery times directly preceded the end‐Pleistocene megafauna extinction, resulting in regional destabilization, and combining with more proximal human impacts to deliver a one‐two punch to megafauna species. Our work indicates that landscapes today are once again exhibiting low resilience, foreboding potential extinctions to come. Conservation strategies focused on improving both landscape and ecosystem resilience by increasing local connectivity and targeting regions with high richness and diverse landforms can mitigate these extinction risks.
This content will become publicly available on October 2, 2024
Effective solutions to conserve biodiversity require accurate community‐ and species‐level information at relevant, actionable scales and across entire species' distributions. However, data and methodological constraints have limited our ability to provide such information in robust ways. Herein we employ a Deep‐Reasoning Network implementation of the Deep Multivariate Probit Model (DMVP‐DRNets), an end‐to‐end deep neural network framework, to exploit large observational and environmental data sets together and estimate landscape‐scale species diversity and composition at continental extents. We present results from a novel year‐round analysis of North American avifauna using data from over nine million eBird checklists and 72 environmental covariates. We highlight the utility of our information by identifying critical areas of high species diversity for a single group of conservation concern, the North American wood warblers, while capturing spatiotemporal variation in species' environmental associations and interspecific interactions. In so doing, we demonstrate the type of accurate, high‐resolution information on biodiversity that deep learning approaches such as DMVP‐DRNets can provide and that is needed to inform ecological research and conservation decision‐making at multiple scales.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1939187
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10470576
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecology
- Volume:
- 104
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 0012-9658
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Over 300 million arthropod specimens are housed in North American natural history collections. These collections represent a “vast hidden treasure trove” of biodiversity −95% of the specimen label data have yet to be transcribed for research, and less than 2% of the specimens have been imaged. Specimen labels contain crucial information to determine species distributions over time and are essential for understanding patterns of ecology and evolution, which will help assess the growing biodiversity crisis driven by global change impacts. Specimen images offer indispensable insight and data for analyses of traits, and ecological and phylogenetic patterns of biodiversity. Here, we review North American arthropod collections using two key metrics, specimen holdings and digitization efforts, to assess the potential for collections to provide needed biodiversity data. We include data from 223 arthropod collections in North America, with an emphasis on the United States. Our specific findings are as follows: (1) The majority of North American natural history collections (88%) and specimens (89%) are located in the United States. Canada has comparable holdings to the United States relative to its estimated biodiversity. Mexico has made the furthest progress in terms of digitization, but its specimen holdings should be increased to reflect the estimated higher Mexican arthropod diversity. The proportion of North American collections that has been digitized, and the number of digital records available per species, are both much lower for arthropods when compared to chordates and plants. (2) The National Science Foundation’s decade-long ADBC program (Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections) has been transformational in promoting arthropod digitization. However, even if this program became permanent, at current rates, by the year 2050 only 38% of the existing arthropod specimens would be digitized, and less than 1% would have associated digital images. (3) The number of specimens in collections has increased by approximately 1% per year over the past 30 years. We propose that this rate of increase is insufficient to provide enough data to address biodiversity research needs, and that arthropod collections should aim to triple their rate of new specimen acquisition. (4) The collections we surveyed in the United States vary broadly in a number of indicators. Collectively, there is depth and breadth, with smaller collections providing regional depth and larger collections providing greater global coverage. (5) Increased coordination across museums is needed for digitization efforts to target taxa for research and conservation goals and address long-term data needs. Two key recommendations emerge: collections should significantly increase both their specimen holdings and their digitization efforts to empower continental and global biodiversity data pipelines, and stimulate downstream research.more » « less
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Abstract Assessments of spatial patterns of biodiversity change are essential to detect a signature of anthropogenic impacts, inform monitoring and conservation programs, and evaluate implications of biodiversity loss to humans. While taxonomic diversity (
TD ) is the most commonly assessed attribute of biodiversity, it misses the potential functional or phylogenetic implications of species losses or gains for ecosystems. Functional diversity (FD ) and phylogenetic diversity (PD ) are able to capture these important trait‐based and phylogenetic attributes of species, but their changes have to date only been evaluated over limited spatial and temporal extents. Employing a novel framework for addressing detectability, we here comprehensively assess a near half‐century of changes in localTD ,FD , andPD of breeding birds across much of North America to examine levels of congruency in changes among these biodiversity facets and their variation across spatial and environmental gradients. Time‐series analysis showed significant and continuous increases in all three biodiversity attributes until ca. 2000, followed by a slow decline since. Comparison of avian diversity at the beginning and end of the temporal series revealed net increase inTD ,FD , andPD , but changes inTD were larger than those inFD andPD , suggesting increasing biotic homogenization of avian assemblages throughout the United States. Changes were greatest at high elevations and latitudes – consistent with purported effects of ongoing climate change on biodiversity. Our findings highlight the potential of combining new types of data with novel statistical models to enable a more integrative monitoring and assessment of the multiple facets of biodiversity. -
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Abstract Understanding how genetic diversity is distributed across spatiotemporal scales in species of conservation or management concern is critical for identifying large‐scale mechanisms affecting local conservation status and implementing large‐scale biodiversity monitoring programmes. However, cross‐scale surveys of genetic diversity are often impractical within single studies, and combining datasets to increase spatiotemporal coverage is frequently impeded by using different sets of molecular markers. Recently developed molecular tools make surveys based on standardized single‐nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) panels more feasible than ever, but require existing genomic information. Here, we conduct the first survey of genome‐wide SNPs across the native range of brook trout (
Salvelinus fontinalis ), a cold‐adapted species that has been the focus of considerable conservation and management effort across eastern North America. Our dataset can be leveraged to easily design SNP panels that allow datasets to be combined for large‐scale analyses. We performed restriction site‐associated DNA sequencing for wild brook trout from 82 locations spanning much of the native range and domestic brook trout from 24 hatchery strains used in stocking efforts. We identified over 24,000 SNPs distributed throughout the brook trout genome. We explored the ability of these SNPs to resolve relationships across spatial scales, including population structure and hatchery admixture. Our dataset captures a wide spectrum of genetic diversity in native brook trout, offering a valuable resource for developing SNP panels. We highlight potential applications of this resource with the goal of increasing the integration of genomic information into decision‐making for brook trout and other species of conservation or management concern. -
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Abstract Aim We investigate geographic patterns across taxonomic, ecological and phylogenetic diversity to test for spatial (in)congruency and identify aggregate diversity hotspots in relationship to present land use and future climate. Simulating extinctions of imperilled species, we demonstrate where losses across diversity dimensions and geography are predicted.
Location North America.
Time period Present day, future.
Major taxa studied Rodentia.
Methods Using geographic range maps for rodent species, we quantified spatial patterns for 11 dimensions of diversity: taxonomic (species, range weighted), ecological (body size, diet and habitat), phylogenetic (mean, variance, and nearest‐neighbour patristic distances, phylogenetic distance and genus‐to‐species ratio) and phyloendemism. We tested for correlations across dimensions and used spatial residual analyses to illustrate regions of pronounced diversity. We aggregated diversity hotspots in relationship to predictions of land‐use and climate change and recalculated metrics following extinctions of IUCN‐listed imperilled species.
Results Topographically complex western North America hosts high diversity across multiple dimensions: phyloendemism and ecological diversity exceed predictions based on taxonomic richness, and phylogenetic variance patterns indicate steep gradients in phylogenetic turnover. An aggregate diversity hotspot emerges in the west, whereas spatial incongruence exists across diversity dimensions at the continental scale. Notably, phylogenetic metrics are uncorrelated with ecological diversity. Diversity hotspots overlap with land‐use and climate change, and extinctions predicted by IUCN status are unevenly distributed across space, phylogeny or ecological groups.
Main conclusions Comparison of taxonomic, ecological and phylogenetic diversity patterns for North American rodents clearly shows the multifaceted nature of biodiversity. Testing for geographic patterns and (in)congruency across dimensions of diversity facilitates investigation into underlying ecological and evolutionary processes. The geographic scope of this analysis suggests that several explicit regional challenges face North American rodent fauna in the future. Simultaneous consideration of multi‐dimensional biodiversity allows us to assess what critical functions or evolutionary history we might lose with future extinctions and maximize the potential of our conservation efforts.
