Quantifying resistance and resilience to local extinction for conservation prioritization.

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Conservation Biology
• Metapopulation Dynamics

Background:

• Traditional conservation focuses on single sites, neglecting landscape-level influences on species persistence.
• Habitat fragmentation, climate change, and overexploitation necessitate broader conservation planning.
• Metapopulation dynamics are crucial for understanding species survival in interconnected, fragmented landscapes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel framework for quantifying species population resistance and resilience in fragmented landscapes.
• To apply this framework to guide conservation efforts for threatened papyrus bird species in East and Central Africa.
• To identify critical sites for multispecies persistence by mapping regional resistance and resilience.

Main Methods:

• Developed a framework based on metapopulation dynamics to assess population survival and reestablishment.
• Utilized two years of occupancy data for five threatened papyrus bird species from a Ugandan wetland network.
• Analyzed local and landscape factors influencing local extinction and colonization rates.

Main Results:

• Identified species-specific factors driving extinction and colonization, leading to varied spatial patterns of resistance and resilience.
• Mapped population turnover rates across the wetland network to pinpoint areas contributing most to regional persistence.
• Found significant overlap in high-resistance and high-resilience sites across most studied species.

Conclusions:

• The simplified metapopulation framework effectively aids conservation planning and prioritization in fragmented habitats.
• Identified key overlapping sites crucial for the multispecies persistence of papyrus endemic birds.
• Highlights the need for adaptive conservation strategies focusing on interconnected sites to address future environmental changes.