Abstract
Biodiversity positively relates with the provisioning of ecosystem services and preserving areas with elevated diversity of highly-functional species could help to ensure human well-being. Most studies addressed to make these decisions use maps relying on species occurrences, where sites containing several species are proposed as priority conservation areas. These maps, however, may underestimate species richness because of the incompleteness of occurrence data. To improve this methodology, we propose using habitat suitability models to estimate the potential distribution of species from occurrence data, and later shaping richness maps by overlapping these predicted distribution ranges. We tested this proposal with Mexican oaks because they provide several ecosystem services and habitat suitability models of species were calibrated with MaxEnt. We used linear regressions to compare the outputs of these predictive maps with those of maps based on species occurrences only and, for both mapping methods, we assessed how much surface of sites with elevated richness and endemism of oaks is currently included within nature reserves. Both mapping methods indicated that oak species are concentrated in mountain regions of Mexico, but predictive maps based on habitat suitability models indicated higher oak richness and endemism that maps based on species occurrences only. Our results also indicated that nature reserves cover a small fraction of areas harboring elevated richness and endemism of oaks. These results suggest that estimating richness across extensive geographic regions using habitat suitability models quickly provides accurate information to make conservation decisions for highly-functional species groups.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the assistance of Juan Pablo Rodas-Ortiz during the compilation of oak occurrence data. This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología de México (Grant CB-2013/221623 to EIB).
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Communicated by David Hawksworth.
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Biodiversity protection and reserves.
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10531_2018_1596_MOESM1_ESM.docx
Supplementary material of this study is freely available at the Zenodo repository under the following doi: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1133339. These materials include a Microsoft Excel file (SM 01-Oak occurrences.xlsx) that contains the occurrence points used to calibrate the habitat suitability models of the 59 oak species. The repository also contains interactive maps indicating the predicted and observed distributions of the 59 Mexican oak species (SM 02-Estimated oak distribution ranges.kmz), as well as the probability-based and occurrence-based maps of oak richness and endemism (SM 03-Oak richness maps.kmz). These maps projections are provided in KMZ format to make them easy to visualize in Google Earth (freely available at www.google.com/earth). Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 13 kb)
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Hernández-Quiroz, N.S., Badano, E.I., Barragán-Torres, F. et al. Habitat suitability models to make conservation decisions based on areas of high species richness and endemism. Biodivers Conserv 27, 3185–3200 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-018-1596-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-018-1596-9