National parks preserve more than species

In a examine printed on-line this week within the journal Biotropica, Rice ecologists and knowledge scientists Daniel Gorczynski and Lydia Beaudrot used 1000’s of digicam entice pictures to evaluate the massive mammal variety within the protected rainforest of Costa Rica’s Braulio Carrillo Nationwide Park.

In wildlife conservation, variety typically refers back to the number of species in an ecosystem. However ecologists additionally examine useful variety, the abundance and variation of traits like physique measurement, food plan and reproductive charge. Trait variety could be measured impartial of species variety and supply extra perception in regards to the total well being of an ecosystem.

Within the examine, Gorczynski and Beaudrot analyzed greater than four,200 pictures of mammals taken within the park between 2007 and 2014 and located the range of mammal traits inside the park didn’t decline, regardless of deforestation that fragmented the forests on greater than half of the encompassing non-public lands.

“It’s a little bit of a shock,” mentioned Gorczynski, a Ph.D. pupil in Rice’s Division of Biosciences. “Earlier research in different places have proven that trait variety is extra delicate to human disturbance than species variety. Trait variety can decline extra rapidly than species variety, each in circumstances the place species go extinct and the place they do not.”

There have been no mammal extinctions in Braulio Carrillo in the course of the eight years of the examine, and Beaudrot, an assistant professor of biosciences at Rice, mentioned the trait evaluation revealed a stage of useful redundancy that might permit the park’s ecosystem to proceed functioning even when a few of its mammals go extinct sooner or later.

“It is well-established that nationwide parks protect species, and our outcomes present nationwide parks could be extra resilient than anticipated, at the very least over the time interval we examined,” she mentioned.

Beaudrot mentioned the outcomes are encouraging, however she mentioned it could be a mistake to imagine that every one nationwide parks are as resilient as Braulio Carrillo.

“This reveals what’s potential, however the scenario may very well be very totally different at different parks or over longer time durations,” she mentioned. “We want comparable research for different parks, different protected areas and nonprotected areas.

“That is an space the place knowledge science could make a distinction,” she mentioned. “A few of the knowledge wanted to make these comparisons are already accessible.”

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