Kerr Jeremy T, Sugar Alissa, Packer Laurence
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, United Kingdom, email
Faculty of Forestry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3B3, Canada.
Conserv Biol. 2000 Dec 18;14(6):1726-1734. doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2000.99275.x.
To prioritize areas for conservation, biologists and managers need information on species diversity in threatened habitats. The resources available for such inventories remain severely limited, increasing the need to develop speedier ways to estimate the status of target habitats. We present a study of the use of such techniques in the highly fragmented oak savannas of southern Ontario, including selection of indicator taxa, use of rapid biodiversity assessment based on morphospecies, and analysis of community structure. We found that butterflies and skippers can be used to predict richness among Hymenoptera in the study sites, which is consistent with the hypothesis that these easily surveyed Lepidoptera are good candidates for indicator status. Richness values for hymenoptera morphospecies in these savanna remnants were strongly correlated with species richness scores as estimated by systematists, although nonspecialists tended to "split" species into more than one morphospecies. Finally, both the Hymenoptera and Lepidoptera communities in these oak savannas exhibited a high degree of nestedness, suggesting that local extinctions, mostly undocumented, are important determinants of the richness patterns across these widely separated savanna study sites. We found no evidence of significant spatial autocorrelation, probably because of the wide separation of study sites.
为了确定保护的优先区域，生物学家和管理人员需要有关受威胁栖息地物种多样性的信息。用于此类清查的资源仍然极为有限，因此愈发需要开发更快速的方法来评估目标栖息地的状况。我们开展了一项研究，探讨这些技术在安大略省南部高度碎片化的橡树林稀树草原中的应用，包括指示分类群的选择、基于形态物种的快速生物多样性评估的使用以及群落结构分析。我们发现，蝴蝶和弄蝶可用于预测研究地点膜翅目的物种丰富度，这与以下假设相符：这些易于调查的鳞翅目昆虫是很好的指示物种候选者。这些稀树草原遗迹中膜翅目形态物种的丰富度值与分类学家估计的物种丰富度得分密切相关，尽管非专业人员往往会将物种“划分”为多个形态物种。最后，这些橡树林稀树草原中的膜翅目和鳞翅目群落都表现出高度的嵌套性，这表明大多未记录的局部灭绝是这些广泛分布的稀树草原研究地点物种丰富度模式的重要决定因素。我们没有发现显著空间自相关的证据，这可能是因为研究地点相距甚远。
