Biology Department, College of Science, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates.
Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2019;1200:13-39. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-23633-5_2.
Both survival and reproduction are important fitness components, and thus critical to the viability of wildlife populations. Preventing one death (survival) or contributing one newborn (reproduction), has arguably the same effect on population dynamics-in each instance the population grows or is maintained by one additional member. However, for the conservation of slow-growing animal populations, the importance of reproduction is sometimes overlooked when evaluating wildlife management options. This has to do with the use of demographic sensitivity analyses, which quantify the relative contribution of vital rates to population growth. For slow-growing populations, the results of such analyses typically show that growth rates are more sensitive to changes in survival than to equal proportional changes in reproduction. Consequently, for slow-growing taxa, survival has been labelled a better fitness surrogate than reproduction. However, such a generalization, derived from conventional sensitivity analyses, is based on flawed approaches, such as omitting appropriate scaling of vital rates, and sometimes misinterpretations. In this chapter, I make the case that for the conservation of slow-growing species the role of reproduction is considerably greater than conventional sensitivity analyses would suggest. This is illustrated by case studies on wildlife populations that underscore the importance of reproduction for the conservation of slow-growing birds, ungulates, carnivores, and cetaceans.
生存和繁殖都是重要的适应度组成部分，因此对野生动物种群的生存能力至关重要。防止一个死亡（生存）或增加一个新出生的个体（繁殖），对种群动态都有同样的影响——在每种情况下，种群都会因增加一个额外的成员而增长或维持。然而，对于生长缓慢的动物种群的保护，在评估野生动物管理方案时，有时会忽视繁殖的重要性。这与使用人口统计学敏感性分析有关，这种分析量化了关键率对种群增长的相对贡献。对于生长缓慢的种群，这种分析的结果通常表明，增长率对生存变化的敏感性比对繁殖的同等比例变化更为敏感。因此，对于生长缓慢的分类群，生存被标记为比繁殖更好的适应度替代指标。然而，这种源自传统敏感性分析的概括是基于有缺陷的方法，例如省略了关键率的适当比例，以及有时的误解。在本章中，我提出了这样一个观点，即在保护生长缓慢的物种方面，繁殖的作用比传统的敏感性分析所表明的要大得多。这通过对野生动物种群的案例研究得到了说明，这些研究强调了繁殖对于保护生长缓慢的鸟类、有蹄类动物、食肉动物和鲸目动物的重要性。
