Abstract
Single-species conservation management is often proposed to preserve biodiversity in human-disturbed landscapes. How global change will impact the umbrella value of single-species management strategies remains an open question of critical conservation importance. We assessed the effectiveness of threatened boreal caribou as an umbrella for bird and beetle conservation under global change. We combined mechanistic, spatially explicit models of forest dynamics and predator-prey interactions to forecast the impact of management strategies on the survival of boreal caribou in boreal forest. We then used predictive models of species occupancy to characterize concurrent impacts on bird and beetle diversity. Landscapes were simulated based on three scenarios of climate change and four of forest management. We found that strategies that best mitigate human impact on boreal caribou were an effective umbrella for maintaining bird and beetle assemblages. While we detected a stronger effect of land-use change compared to climate change, the umbrella value of management strategies for caribou habitat conservation were still impacted by the severity of climate change. Our results showed an interplay among changes in forest attributes, boreal caribou mortality, as well as bird and beetle species assemblages. The conservation status of some species mandates the development of recovery strategies, highlighting the importance of our study which shows that single-species conservation can have important umbrella benefits despite global change.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 168087 |
| Pages (from-to) | 168087 |
| Journal | Science of the Total Environment |
| Volume | 907 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 10 2024 |
Funding
We are grateful to Alexandre Terrigeol for the data collection, and Nicolas Bédard et Georges Pelletier for the identification of beetle species. We thank Patrick Desrosiers, Jérôme Garet and Jérôme Rioux for their contribution on the manuscript. We thank also Junior A. Tremblay for his expertise on bird species classification. We also thank the Regroupement QuébecOiseaux, the Canadian Wildlife Service of Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Birds Canada for supplying Atlas data. We are grateful to the thousands of volunteer participants who collected data for the Quebec breeding bird atlases field campaigns. This research was supported by the Sentinel North program of Université Laval (Project 1.1), made possible, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. We thank the NSERC-Laval University Industrial Research Chair in Silviculture and Wildlife for providing financial support for the acquisition of animal monitoring data used for this project (Grant n° 193891). We acknowledge Calcul Québec and Compute Canada for their technical support and computing infrastructures. G.L. and D.F. conceived the project. Y.B. simulated landscapes with the forest simulation model. J-M.B. and C.H. were in charge of the insect database. G.L. calibrated the individual-based model, analyzed the data and produced results. IB did the distribution models for birds and beetles. G.L. D.F. M.H. and Y.B wrote the paper. All authors discussed the analyses and results, and edited the manuscript text, and gave final approval for publication. Y.B. provided constant good humor to the team by making dad's jokes and dad's noise from his office and also by buying Vachon Billot-Logs to the whole team. We are grateful to Alexandre Terrigeol for the data collection, and Nicolas Bédard et Georges Pelletier for the identification of beetle species. We thank Patrick Desrosiers, Jérôme Garet and Jérôme Rioux for their contribution on the manuscript. We thank also Junior A. Tremblay for his expertise on bird species classification. We also thank the Regroupement QuébecOiseaux, the Canadian Wildlife Service of Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Birds Canada for supplying Atlas data. We are grateful to the thousands of volunteer participants who collected data for the Quebec breeding bird atlases field campaigns. This research was supported by the Sentinel North program of Université Laval (Project 1.1), made possible, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund . We thank the NSERC-Laval University Industrial Research Chair in Silviculture and Wildlife for providing financial support for the acquisition of animal monitoring data used for this project (Grant n° 193891 ). We acknowledge Calcul Québec and Compute Canada for their technical support and computing infrastructures.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| 193891 | |
| Université Laval | |
Keywords
- Biodiversity
- Climate change
- Land-use change
- Single-species management
- Species assemblages
- Species conservation
- Umbrella species
- Forests
- Coleoptera
- Birds
- Animals
- Ecosystem
- Reindeer
- Taiga
- Conservation of Natural Resources/methods
