Connectivity has long played a central role in ecological and evolutionary theory and is increasingly emphasized for conserving biodiversity. Nonetheless, connectivity assessments often focus on individual species even though understanding and preserving connectivity for entire communities is urgently needed. Here we derive and test a framework that harnesses the well-known allometric scaling of animal movement to predict community-level connectivity across protected area networks. We used a field translocation experiment involving 39 species of southern African birds to quantify movement capacity, scaled this relationship to realized dispersal distances determined from ring-and-recovery banding data, and used allometric scaling equations to quantify community-level connectivity based on multilayer network theory. The translocation experiment explained observed dispersal distances from ring-recovery data and emphasized allometric scaling of dispersal based on morphology. Our community-level networks predicted that larger-bodied species had a relatively high potential for connectivity, while small-bodied species had lower connectivity. These community networks explained substantial variation in observed bird diversity across protected areas. Our results highlight that harnessing allometric scaling can be an effective way of determining large-scale community connectivity. We argue that this trait-based framework founded on allometric scaling provides a means to predict connectivity for entire communities, which can foster empirical tests of community theory and contribute to biodiversity conservation strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of environmental change.
Land-cover and land-use change are major drivers of global biodiversity loss. Savannas are experiencing shrub encroachment and land-use changes that affect animal communities, yet how the effects of shrub encroachment vary with land use remains unclear. We also need to determine which species traits explain the effects of shrub encroachment and land-use changes to identify potential drivers of community change and predict species' responses to conservation efforts. We sampled birds across gradients of shrub encroachment and land use (protected savanna, pastures, homestead lands, and sugarcane) in the lowveld savanna of Eswatini to: (1) test for the effects of shrub encroachment, land-use change, and their potential synergies on the occurrence of 48 species of birds; and (2) determine which species traits (those associated with nesting, foraging, or vulnerability to predation) explained species' associations with shrub encroachment and land-use change. We used Bayesian multispecies occupancy models to account for imperfect detection, interpret species responses, and understand the effects of species traits. We found evidence for community-wide synergies between shrub encroachment and land-use effects on birds that varied with species' diets. Agricultural intensification had negative effects on the occurrence of most species examined, while shrub cover typically had positive effects which were stronger in pastures and homestead lands than in protected areas. The negative effects of land-use change were greatest for insectivores and cavity nesters, whereas insectivore occurrence increased with shrub cover, collectively indicating that nesting and foraging traits best explained species responses to land-use and land-cover change in the region. Our results suggest that shrub cover management for bird conservation should vary with land use: shrubs could be thinned in protected areas without reducing bird occupancy but shrubs in homesteads should be retained.
National species checklists are important for a variety of reasons, including biodiversity conservation. However, these national checklists are rarely complete, and it is not easy to gauge how many species have been overlooked or what the taxonomic identities of overlooked species would be. This is particularly the case for small, elusive, or nocturnal species such as bats. Despite their diversity and importance as ecosystem service providers, bat distributions are poorly known throughout much of Africa. We present a national checklist of bats for a small African country, Eswatini, by compiling species from museum specimens and literature records. A total of 32 species of bats have been recorded from the country. Since 1995, new species have continued to be 1 recorded in the country, with five additional species added since the last published checklist in 2016, suggesting that some species may have still been overlooked. In order to determine what species these may be, we used species distribution models based on the occurrence records of bats from southern Africa to predict what species would occur in Eswatini, which was then compared with what has been collected and deposited in museums. Our models predicted that a total of 47 species are likely to occur in Eswatini compared with 32 species collected to date. Our data suggest that the national checklist of bats of Eswatini is not yet complete and that further species are expected to be recorded for the country. We suggest that species distribution models can be useful in gauging the completeness of national checklists and in predicting which species may have been overlooked.
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