Ecological niche modelling and prioritizing areas for species reintroductions

Species reintroduction programmes, in prioritizing areas for reintroductions, have traditionally used tools that include measures of habitat suitability and evaluations of area requirements for viable populations. Here we add two tools to this approach: evaluation of ecological requirements of species and evaluation of future suitability for species facing changing climates. We demonstrate this approach with two species for which reintroduction programmes are in the planning stages in Mexico: California condor Gymnogyps californianus and Mexican wolf Canis lupus baileyi. For the condor, we identify three areas clustered in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir, Baja California; for the wolf, we identify a string of suitable sites along the Sierra Madre Occidental of western Mexico. We discuss the limitations of this approach, identifying ways in which the models illustrated could be made more realistic and directly useful to reintroduction programmes.

[1]  W. Cramer,et al.  Special Paper: Modelling Present and Potential Future Ranges of Some European Higher Plants Using Climate Response Surfaces , 1995 .

[2]  Roland H. Lamberson,et al.  Reserve Design for Territorial Species: The Effects of Patch Size and Spacing on the Viability of the Northern Spotted Owl* , 1994 .

[3]  R. Manville,et al.  The Mammals of North America , 1959 .

[4]  K. McGarigal,et al.  FRAGSTATS: spatial pattern analysis program for quantifying landscape structure. , 1995 .

[5]  David R. B. Stockwell,et al.  Future projections for Mexican faunas under global climate change scenarios , 2002, Nature.

[6]  P. Bright,et al.  Biological invasions provide a framework for reintroductions: selecting areas in England for pine marten releases , 2001, Biodiversity & Conservation.

[7]  A. Peterson,et al.  Effects of global climate change on geographic distributions of Mexican Cracidae , 2001 .

[8]  D. Macdonald,et al.  Simulating the proposed reintroduction of the European beaver (Castor fiber) to Scotland , 2000 .

[9]  T. Garland,et al.  Predictors of Avian and Mammalian Translocation Success: Reanalysis with Phylogenetically Independent Contrasts , 2022 .

[10]  A. Peterson,et al.  Predicting species invasions using ecological niche modeling , 2001 .

[11]  P. Carey,et al.  The Use of GIS to Identify Sites that will become Suitable for a Rare Orchid, Himantoglossum hircinum L., in a Future Changed Climate , 1994 .

[12]  G. Edwards‐Jones,et al.  Reintroducing capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) into southern Scotland: identification of minimum viable populations at potential release sites , 1998, Biodiversity & Conservation.

[13]  G. Edwards‐Jones,et al.  A feasibility study of reintroducing wild boar Sus scrofa to Scotland: Are existing woodlands large enough to support minimum viable populations , 1997 .

[14]  A. Peterson.  Projected climate change effects on Rocky Mountain and Great Plains birds: generalities of biodiversity consequences , 2003 .

[15]  J. M. Baveco,et al.  Development and viability of a translocated beaver Castor fiber population in The Netherlands , 1996 .

[16]  G. G. Goodwin,et al.  Mammals from the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, in the American Museum of Natural History. Bulletin of the AMNH ; v. 141, article 1 , 1969 .

[17]  Kenneth M. Portier,et al.  Modeling Florida panther movements in response to human attributes of the landscape and ecological settings , 2001 .

[18]  D. Carson,et al.  Climate modelling: Achievements and prospects , 1999 .

[19]  Robert P. Anderson,et al.  Evaluating predictive models of species’ distributions: criteria for selecting optimal models , 2003 .

[20]  Bruce D. Patterson,et al.  The Principle of Nested Subsets and Its Implications for Biological Conservation , 1987 .

[21]  J. Grinnell.  Field Tests of Theories Concerning Distributional Control , 1917, The American Naturalist.

[22]  R. Kadmon,et al.  Modelling faunal responses to climatic gradients with GIS: land snails as a case study , 1998 .

[23]  A. Peterson.  Predicting the Geography of Species’ Invasions via Ecological Niche Modeling , 2003, The Quarterly Review of Biology.

[24]  Hugh P. Possingham,et al.  Modelling the reintroduction of the greater bilby Macrotis lagotis using the metapopulation model Analysis of the Likelihood of Extinction (ALEX) , 1995 .

[25]  David R. B. Stockwell,et al.  Effects of sample size on accuracy of species distribution models , 2002 .

[26]  A. O. Nicholls,et al.  Measurement of the realized qualitative niche: environmental niches of five Eucalyptus species , 1990 .

[27]  Robert P. Anderson,et al.  Geographical distributions of spiny pocket mice in South America: insights from predictive models , 2002 .

[28]  R. G. Wright,et al.  Defining landscapes suitable for restoration of grizzly bears Ursus arctos in Idaho , 1999 .

[29]  Marinez Ferreira de Siqueira,et al.  Consequences of global climate change for geographic distributions of cerrado tree species , 2003 .

[30]  A. Peterson,et al.  Predicting Species Invasions Using Ecological Niche Modeling: New Approaches from Bioinformatics Attack a Pressing Problem , 2001 .

[31]  D. Klein,et al.  Using GIS to predict potential wildlife habitat: A case study of muskoxen in northern Alaska , 2002 .

[32]  O. Phillips,et al.  Extinction risk from climate change , 2004, Nature.

[33]  A. Peterson,et al.  Sensitivity of distributional prediction algorithms to geographic data completeness , 1999 .

[34]  The Mammals of North America , 1959 .

[35]  Marco Painho,et al.  Geographic Analysis of California Condor Sighting Data , 1993 .

[36]  J. Severinghaus,et al.  Global climate change. , 1999, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[37]  David R. B. Stockwell,et al.  The GARP modelling system: problems and solutions to automated spatial prediction , 1999, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[38]  G. Carpenter,et al.  DOMAIN: a flexible modelling procedure for mapping potential distributions of plants and animals , 1993, Biodiversity & Conservation.

[39]  P. Seddon,et al.  Persistence without intervention: assessing success in wildlife reintroductions. , 1999, Trends in ecology & evolution.