NSFDEB-NERC: Collaborative Research: Wildlife corridors: do they work and who benefits?

NSFDEB-NERC：合作研究：野生动物走廊：它们有效吗？谁受益？

• 批准号: 2041095
• 负责人: Paul Beier
• 金额: $ 42.38万
• 依托单位: Climate Conservation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-01-15 至 2024-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2041095&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NSFDEB; NERC; Collaborative; Research; Wildlife

In recent years, governments have begun to connect parks and other large natural areas by conserving wildlife corridors – swaths of semi-natural land intended to allow the free flow of animals between natural areas. The hope is that the connected areas will sustain large, genetically diverse populations and ecological processes, such as pollination and seed dispersal. But there is little science to guide how wildlife corridors are put into practice and to minimize their costs, including costs of restricting human uses of the land. How many and what types of fences, roads, pastures, gardens, and buildings can be permitted in the corridor? How wide do corridors need to be? Do some wildlife species use corridors more readily than others? Most of what we think we know about corridors comes from small experiments on 3-acre patches of habitat connected by 100-ft-wide corridors with no human activities nearby, and using animal presence or movement to measure corridor effectiveness. This study will involve corridors and patches 100 times larger, and in landscapes with various human activities nearby. Furthermore, this project will use genetics instead of animal presence or movement as a better way to measure how well corridors work. By these innovations and by measuring responses of multiple species, this study will help scientists understand corridor effectiveness. It will also help society implement corridors that are effective while minimizing all sorts of costs. This study will use large corridors and habitat patches that have been stable for 50-200 years, so that genetic patterns reflect the influence of landscape pattern. Each landscape contains a corridor connecting two natural patches and two types of reference conditions, namely two patches lacking a connection that are about the same size and interpatch distance as the connected patches, and an intact natural area containing two sampling locales with similar size and spacing. The study will use 20 independent landscapes to quantify how corridor traits affect gene flow, and will use non-flying mammals as focal species because they are strongly affected by fragmentation. The research team hypothesizes (1) a strong non-linear decline in success (gene flow) with corridor length, reflecting the skewed distribution of dispersal distances within species; (2) success will drop steeply as corridor width falls below a threshold, with the threshold determined by species traits; and (3) species that are bigger, are habitat specialists, or have greater dispersal abilities (relative to brain size or reproductive rate) will benefit more from corridors. Testing these hypotheses will allow generalization to a wide range of mammal species not included in this project. We will use highly flexible Random Forest models to answer the overarching question: What landscape traits (e.g., corridor width, degree of human disturbance) and species traits (mobility, affinity to particular land cover types) are associated with effective corridors?This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

近年来，政府已经开始通过保护野生动植物走廊来连接公园和其他大型自然区域 - 半天然土地旨在允许自然区域之间的动物自由流动。希望的是，互联区将维持大量，一般的人群和生态过程，例如授粉和种子分散。但是，几乎没有科学来指导如何将野生动植物走廊付诸实践并最大程度地降低其成本，包括限制人类用途的成本。走廊可以允许多少种和几种类型的围栏，道路，牧场，花园和建筑物？走廊需要多大？某些野生动植物物种比其他野生动植物更容易使用吗？我们认为我们对走廊的了解中的大部分内容都来自于在附近没有100英尺宽的走廊连接的3英亩栖息地的小实验中，并使用动物的存在或运动来衡量走廊的有效性。这项研究将涉及走廊和斑块大100倍，并在附近有各种人类活动的景观中。此外，该项目将使用遗传学，而不是动物的存在或运动，作为衡量走廊工作效果的更好方法。通过这些创新并通过衡量多种物种的反应，这项研究将帮助科学家了解走廊的有效性。它还将帮助社会实施有效的走廊，同时最大程度地减少各种成本。这项研究将使用已有50 - 200年的稳定的大走廊和栖息地斑块，因此遗传模式反映了景观模式的影响。每个景观都包含一个连接两个天然贴片和两种参考条件的走廊，即缺少与连接斑块的尺寸和接口距离的连接的两个贴片，以及一个完整的自然区域，其中包含两个带有相似大小和间距的样本中。该研究将使用20种独立的景观来量化走廊特征如何影响基因流，并将非飞行的哺乳动物用作焦点物种，因为它们受到碎片化的强烈影响。研究小组假设（1）成功的非线性下降（基因流），其走廊长度很长，反映了物种内分散距离的偏斜分布； （2）由于走廊宽度降至阈值以下，其阈值由物种特征确定； （3）更大的物种是栖息地专家，或具有更大的分散能力（相对于脑大小或生殖率）将从走廊中受益更多。测试这些假设将允许对本项目不包括的多种哺乳动物物种进行概括。我们将使用高度灵活的随机森林模型来回答总体问题：哪些景观特征（例如，走廊的宽度，人类灾难程度）和物种特质（流动性，与特定土地覆盖类型的亲和力）与有效的走廊相关联？该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基础的智力效果和宽阔的评估来评估NSF的法定任务，并具有珍贵的支持。