Regos Adrián, Tapia Luis, Gil-Carrera Alberto, Domínguez Jesús
Departamento de Zooloxía, Xenética e Antropoloxía Física, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Campus Sur, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
CIBIO/InBIO, Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, Predictive Ecology Group, Campus Agrario de Vairão, R. Padre Armando Quintas, N° 7, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugal.
Animals (Basel). 2021 Jul 6;11(7):2020. doi: 10.3390/ani11072020.
Despite the mounting evidence supporting positive relationships between species abundance and habitat suitability, the capacity of ecological niche models (ENMs) to capture variations in population abundance remains largely unexplored. This study focuses on sympatric populations of hen harrier () and Montagu's harrier (), surveyed in 1997 and 2017 in an upland moor area in northwestern Spain. The ENMs performed very well for both species (with area under the ROC curve and true skill statistic values of up to 0.9 and 0.75). The presence of both species was mainly correlated with heathlands, although the normalized difference water index derived from Landsat images was the most important for hen harrier, indicating a greater preference of this species for wet heaths and peat bogs. The findings showed that ENM-derived habitat suitability was significantly correlated with the species abundance, thus reinforcing the use of ENMs as a proxy for species abundance. However, the temporal variation in species abundance was not significantly explained by changes in habitat suitability predicted by the ENMs, indicating the need for caution when using these types of models to infer changes in population abundance.
尽管越来越多的证据支持物种丰富度与栖息地适宜性之间存在正相关关系，但生态位模型（ENMs）捕捉种群丰富度变化的能力在很大程度上仍未得到探索。本研究聚焦于1997年和2017年在西班牙西北部一个高地沼地地区调查的白尾鹞（）和乌灰鹞（）的同域种群。这两种物种的生态位模型表现都非常出色（ROC曲线下面积和真实技能统计值分别高达0.9和0.75）。这两种物种的出现主要与石南荒地相关，不过，源自陆地卫星图像的归一化差异水体指数对白尾鹞最为重要，这表明该物种更偏好潮湿的石南荒地和泥炭沼泽。研究结果表明，生态位模型得出的栖息地适宜性与物种丰富度显著相关，从而强化了将生态位模型用作物种丰富度替代指标的用途。然而，生态位模型预测的栖息地适宜性变化并未显著解释物种丰富度的时间变化，这表明在使用这类模型推断种群丰富度变化时需要谨慎。
