Gap analysis of India's Western Ghats protected area network: insights from new and understudied endemic species' distributions
Date
2018
Authors
Miltenberger, Oliver, author
Leisz, Stephen, advisor
Evangelista, Paul, committee member
Pejchar, Liba, committee member
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Abstract
Protected areas are a crucial tool to meet conservation goals of the 21st century, especially in biodiverse regions threatened by land use change. This study makes use of nine years of field data collected on over 300 understudied plants and amphibians endemic to the UNESCO-recognized biodiversity hotspot of the Western Ghats of India to produce a gap analysis of its protected area network. The gap analysis updates previous analyses to reassess network coverage and to improve biodiversity distribution estimates. Software for Assisted Habitat Modeling (SAHM) queries possible species distribution models (SDMs) and predictor variables for thirty-five of these species sub-grouped by range strategies. This generates parsimonious sets of predictor variables as well as performance assessments of SDMs, which then populate batch-run distribution Maximum Entropy models (Maxent). These distributions are overlain in various ensembles to produce clade and biodiversity specific insights about high and low-occurrences areas for these species. Hotspot assessments of the region are generated using ensembled distributions and are compared to the current protected area network to identify gaps in coverage for high-occurrences of these species' distributions. Most high species co-occurrences for both amphibian and plant distributions are covered by the network with the exception of three regions for amphibians and six regions for plants, two of which overlap between clades. Previous studies largely or exclusively used secondary-data for their assessments while the majority of species in this study have never been modeled or included in gap analyses. This study's assessment adds new ecological information to individual species and novel contributions to conservation planning in a threatened biodiversity hotspot. This study recommends inclusion of the seven identified high-occurrences areas in future conservation efforts for the Western Ghats and prioritization of the two areas identified as gaps in protection for both clades.
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Subject
species distribution models
conservation