Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 117, Issue 36, Pages 22274-22280Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2001614117
Keywords
birds; dispersal; landscape; translocation experiment; network
Categories
Funding
- University of Florida's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
- Institute of Food and Agricultural Science
- NSF [DEB-1655555]
- NSF-IRES [1459882]
- Office Of The Director
- Office Of Internatl Science &Engineering [1459882] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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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 multilayer network theory. The translocation experiment explained observed dispersal distances from ring-recovery data and emphasized allometric scaling of dispersal based on morphology. Our community-level networks predicted that larger-bodied species had a relatively high potential for connectivity, while small-bodied species had lower connectivity. These community networks explained substantial variation in observed bird diversity across protected areas. Our results high-light that harnessing allometric scaling can be an effective way of determining large-scale community connectivity. We argue that this trait-based framework founded on allometric scaling provides a means to predict connectivity for entire communities, which can foster empirical tests of community theory and contribute to biodiversity conservation strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of environmental change.
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