Human and ecological determinants of the spatial structure of local breed diversity

Abstract

Since domestication, a large number of livestock breeds adapted to local conditions have been created by natural and artificial selection, representing one of the most powerful ways in which human groups have constructed niches to meet their need. Although many authors have described local breeds as the result of culturally and environmentally mediated processes, this study, located in mainland Spain, is the first aimed at identifying and quantifying the environmental and human contributions to the spatial structure of local breed diversity, which we refer to as livestock niche. We found that the more similar two provinces were in terms of human population, ecological characteristics, historical ties, and geographic distance, the more similar the composition of local breeds in their territories. Isolation by human population distance showed the strongest effect, followed by isolation by the environment, thus supporting the view of livestock niche as a socio-cultural product adapted to the local environment, in whose construction humans make good use of their ecological and cultural inheritances. These findings provide a useful framework to understand and to envisage the effects of climate change and globalization on local breeds and their livestock niches.

Relationships between the distribution of wildlife and livestock diversity

“…When a clear description of the area of origin was unavailable, we assigned the oldest area where the breed was distributed before the agrarian industrialization. We assume that these areas represent the historical eco‐cultural domains of each local livestock breed (Colino‐Rabanal et al, 2018). Within these areas, wildlife has interacted with livestock for extended periods of time.…”

“…Thus, our data set encompasses all extant and recently extinct breeds, based on their historical distributions, prior to being exposed to the effects of agricultural intensification over the last decades (Tisdell, 2003). Therefore, our measure of livestock diversity should be interpreted as the capacity of each grid cell to harbour long-term breed diversity or as the historical diversity of land-based livestock systems, reliant on local natural resources (Colino-Rabanal et al, 2018;Gómez-Sal, 2001), avoiding potential biases due to recent erosion of agrobiodiversity.…”

“…These local livestock breeds evolved long before industrialization, are unique autochthonous of certain regions and have been regarded to as eco-cultural entities (see e.g. Sponenberg, Martin, Couch, & Beranger, 2019), the product of adaptation to local environmental and human conditions (Colino-Rabanal, Rodríguez-Díaz, Blanco-Villegas, Peris, & Lizana, 2018). Despite the long history of interactions and potential influences of livestock on wildlife across this region, little is known about how and if, both wildlife diversity and livestock diversity are related.…”

“…This distribution is also influenced by the historical interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes, such as extinction and colonization events in response to climatic changes within the biogeographic constrains of the Iberian topography (Blondel & Mourer‐Chauviré, 1998). Much less is known about the distribution of local livestock breeds, but previous studies suggest that they would be positively correlated with terrestrial vertebrate diversity (Colino‐Rabanal et al, 2018). The question arises as to whether this would be true for the geographic distributions of wildlife and domesticated livestock diversity in Spain.…”

Livestock biodiversity as interface between people, landscapes and nature

“…For this to be achieved, genetic studies, based on hypothesis testing, will need to be combined with a cultural studies approach. The possibilities for a productive collaboration do exist; an example is the study of Colino‐Rabanal, Rodríguez‐Díaz, Blanco‐Villegas, Peris, and Lizana () who applied a Mantel correlation test to genetic distances matrices. Results supported a hypothesis that had originated from cultural studies (Hall, ), that genetic distances between present‐day human populations would be correlated with those between their respective livestock populations.…”