Ministry of Forest, Environment and Soil Conservation, Gandaki Province, Ratnachwok, Kaski, Pokhara, Nepal.
Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden.
Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 9;11(1):21901. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-01504-y.
Vultures are ecologically important primarily because of their scavenging role in cleaning carcasses of the environment. Because of anthropogenic impacts, the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) has suffered catastrophic declines in parts of its range and, thus, information about its global distribution and factors influencing its occurrence within this range are essential for its conservation. To this end, we estimated the global distribution of Egyptian vulture and variables related to this distribution. We used occurrence points (n = 4740) from online data sources and literature, environmental variables related to these sites and Maximum Entropy software to model the distribution of this species and its relationship to environmental variables during the entire year, breeding and overwintering. Out of ~ 49 million km study area, the Egyptian vulture had a predicted range of 6,599,508 km distributed across three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe. The densest distribution was in Southern Europe, India and Northern Africa and a sparser distribution was around Mid and Western Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan. Climate was related to the vulture's most probable range: in particular medium temperature seasonality and low precipitation during the coldest yearly quarter were important variables regardless of the season of observations examined. Conservation of identified habitats and mitigation of anthropogenic impacts to conserve these vultures are recommended for immediate and long-term conservation of the Egyptian vulture globally.
兀鹫在生态系统中非常重要，主要是因为它们在清理环境中的尸体方面发挥了清道夫的作用。由于人为的影响，埃及秃鹫（Neophron percnopterus）在其分布的某些地区遭受了灾难性的减少，因此，了解其全球分布情况以及影响其在该范围内出现的因素对于保护它们至关重要。为此，我们估计了埃及秃鹫的全球分布情况以及与其分布相关的变量。我们使用了来自在线数据来源和文献的出现点（n=4740），以及与这些地点相关的环境变量和最大熵软件，来模拟该物种的分布及其与整个一年、繁殖和越冬期间环境变量的关系。在约 4900 万平方千米的研究区域中，埃及秃鹫的预测分布范围为 6599508 平方千米，分布在三大洲：非洲、亚洲和欧洲。最密集的分布在南欧、印度和北非，而在中非和西非、中东和阿富汗地区的分布则较为稀疏。气候与秃鹫的最可能分布范围有关：特别是在最寒冷的季度中，中等温度季节性和低降水量是重要的变量，而无论观察的季节如何。建议保护已确定的栖息地并减轻人为影响，以保护这些秃鹫，从而实现埃及秃鹫在全球范围内的长期保护。
