Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Buckhurst Road, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK.
Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2019 Sep 16;374(1781):20190012. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0012. Epub 2019 Jul 29.
Insights into animal behaviour play an increasingly central role in species-focused conservation practice. However, progress towards incorporating behaviour into regional or global conservation strategies has been more limited, not least because standardized datasets of behavioural traits are generally lacking at wider taxonomic or spatial scales. Here we make use of the recent expansion of global datasets for birds to assess the prospects for including behavioural traits in systematic conservation priority-setting and monitoring programmes. Using International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List classifications for more than 9500 bird species, we show that the incidence of threat can vary substantially across different behavioural categories, and that some types of behaviour-including particular foraging, mating and migration strategies-are significantly more threatened than others. The link between behavioural traits and extinction risk is partly driven by correlations with well-established geographical and ecological factors (e.g. range size, body mass, human population pressure), but our models also reveal that behaviour modifies the effect of these factors, helping to explain broad-scale patterns of extinction risk. Overall, these results suggest that a multi-species approach at the scale of communities, continents and ecosystems can be used to identify and monitor threatened behaviours, and to flag up cases of latent extinction risk, where threatened status may currently be underestimated. Our findings also highlight the importance of comprehensive standardized descriptive data for ecological and behavioural traits, and point the way towards deeper integration of behaviour into quantitative conservation assessments. This article is part of the theme issue 'Linking behaviour to dynamics of populations and communities: application of novel approaches in behavioural ecology to conservation'.
动物行为的深入研究在以物种为中心的保护实践中发挥着越来越核心的作用。然而，将行为纳入区域或全球保护战略的进展较为有限，部分原因是在更广泛的分类或空间尺度上，通常缺乏标准化的行为特征数据集。在这里，我们利用鸟类全球数据集的最新扩展，评估将行为特征纳入系统保护优先规划和监测计划的前景。我们使用国际自然保护联盟（IUCN）对 9500 多种鸟类物种的红色名录分类，表明威胁的发生率在不同行为类别中可能有很大差异，某些类型的行为——包括特定的觅食、交配和迁徙策略——比其他行为受到的威胁更大。行为特征与灭绝风险之间的联系部分是由与已确立的地理和生态因素（如分布范围大小、体重、人类人口压力）的相关性驱动的，但我们的模型也表明，行为改变了这些因素的影响，有助于解释广泛的灭绝风险模式。总体而言，这些结果表明，可以在社区、大陆和生态系统的多个物种层面上采用一种方法来识别和监测受到威胁的行为，并标记潜在灭绝风险的情况，因为目前可能低估了受威胁的状态。我们的研究结果还强调了生态和行为特征全面标准化描述性数据的重要性，并为将行为更深入地纳入定量保护评估指明了方向。本文是主题为“将行为与种群和群落动态联系起来：行为生态学新方法在保护中的应用”的一部分。
