DRIVE · Quantifying the relative importance of natural and anthropogenic drivers of spatial variation in vulnerability to predict species extinction risk

Quantifying the relative importance of natural and anthropogenic drivers of spatial variation in vulnerability to predict species extinction risk

DRIVE arose from the need to understand global species extinction patterns, a societal major challenge. Current models predicting extinction risk show poor explanatory power. To overlook this, DRIVE focusses on populations instead of species, as a species extinction results from a sequence of local population extirpations. Population size and demography greatly determine tolerance to human impacts, and may vary geographically with environmental conditions. This variability can be considered as the intrinsic vulnerability of local populations to extirpation. Its existence has been confirmed for a few large mammals using biomes to define environmental conditions. This approach does not allow to assess this vulnerability for the majority of species. DRIVE aimed to quantify the relative importance of natural and anthropogenic factors in driving species inherent vulnerability, with the ultimate goal of including it as a key trait into models of extinction risk. Objectives were to 1) build a novel global biogeographic template for mammals to define small biogeographic regions (Obj 1); 2) find the determinants of these small biogeographic regions (Obj 2); 3) build models including small biogeographic regions as predictors to determine the role of natural and anthropogenic factors in the population extirpation risk (Obj 3); 4) build predictive models of extinction risk incorporating species inherent vulnerability. Conclusions so far: 1) the world’s biodiversity is organised with a hierarchical structure of global biogeographical patterns that include a local basis determined by multiple and spatially heterogeneous factors; 2) geological events that occurred over millions of years permeate from the largest to the smaller scales, yet understanding biogeographical delineations at more local scales requires determinants acting at multiple temporal and spatial scales; 3) the signal of Holocene anthropogenic impacts can be already detected in the configuration of realms, traditionally assumed to be the organisation of biodiversity from ecological, historical, and evolutionary processes over millions of years; 4) the amount of energy (in terms of biomass) left in the ecosystems after human harvesting is a better predictor of extinction risk than the direct human impact, which can be related to the energy that populations need to survive.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз