Tracking population extirpations via melding ecological niche modeling with landcover information

Abstract

the method is applicable to any species for which distributional information exists and any region for which multitemporal landcover information has been developed. We envisage this approach evolving into a "population loss meter", permitting monitoring of losses of speciesspecific combinations of environmental and landscape features.

We explored a new approach to tracking population losses in poorly known species across broad spatial scales, based on integration of tools freom ecological niche modeling with data resources derived freom remotely sensed landcover information. Ecological niches were modeled based on known occurrences of species (natural history museum specimen data) and environmental dimensions including topography, climate and original vegetation

these niche models were then projected onto land use/landcover maps (with classes equivalent to those in the original vegetation dataset) based on air photography and LandSat imagery freom 1976, 1993 and 2000, to track loss of potential distributional area over two decades. As an illustration, we analyzed 11 endemic Corvidae (jays) in Mexico