Departamento de Biologia, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biodiversidade Animal, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Departamento Interdisciplinar, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Campus Litoral Norte, Tramandaí, Brazil.
PLoS One. 2021 Nov 11;16(11):e0259626. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259626. eCollection 2021.
Human activities have been changing the global biogeographic patterns by the introductions of invasive species. For reptiles, the invasion rate increase of non-native species is remarkably related to the pet trade, especially for freshwater turtles. Here we estimated the invasive potential of the South American turtle Trachemys dorbigni in the Americas using a combination of climatic and human activity variables. We built species distribution models based on data from the native and invasive ranges, using the ensemble model from five different algorithms (GAM, MAXENT, BRT, RF and GBM). We compared the two models' performance and predictions, one calibrated with only climatic variables (climate-driven), and the second also included a descriptive variable of human activity (climate plus human-driven). Suitable areas for T. dorbigni covered occurrence areas of its congeners and highly diversified ecoregions, such as the eastern USA, the islands of Central America, and the south eastern and eastern Brazilian coast. Our results indicate that human activities allow T. dorbigni to establish populations outside of its original climatic niche. Including human activity variables proved fundamental to refining the results to identify more susceptible areas to invasion and to allow the efficient targeting of prevention measures. Finally, we suggested a set of actions to prevent T. dorbigni becoming a highly impacting species in the areas identified as more prone to its invasion.
人类活动通过引入入侵物种改变了全球生物地理格局。对于爬行动物来说，非本地物种的入侵率增加与宠物贸易密切相关，尤其是淡水龟类。在这里，我们使用气候和人类活动变量的组合来估计南美洲龟 Trachemys dorbigni 在美洲的入侵潜力。我们根据来自本地和入侵范围的数据构建了物种分布模型，使用来自五个不同算法（GAM、MAXENT、BRT、RF 和 GBM）的集合模型。我们比较了这两个模型的性能和预测，一个仅用气候变量校准（气候驱动），另一个还包括人类活动的描述性变量（气候加人类驱动）。T. dorbigni 的适宜区域覆盖了其同属种的出现区域和高度多样化的生态区，如美国东部、中美洲岛屿以及巴西南部和东部沿海地区。我们的结果表明，人类活动使 T. dorbigni 能够在其原始气候小生境之外建立种群。包括人类活动变量对于改进结果以识别更易受入侵影响的区域以及有效地针对预防措施非常重要。最后，我们提出了一系列行动来防止 T. dorbigni 在被认为更容易受到入侵的地区成为具有高度影响的物种。
