Curveira-Santos Gonçalo, Gigliotti Laura, Sutherland Chris, Rato Daniela, Santos-Reis Margarida, Swanepoel Lourens H
Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c), Faculdade de Ciências Universidade de Lisboa Lisbon Portugal.
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management University of California Berkeley Berkeley CA USA.
Ecol Evol. 2022 Aug 29;12(8):e9239. doi: 10.1002/ece3.9239. eCollection 2022 Aug.
Carnivore intraguild dynamics depend on a complex interplay of environmental affinities and interspecific interactions. Context-dependency is commonly expected with varying suites of interacting species and environmental conditions but seldom empirically described. In South Africa, decentralized approaches to conservation and the resulting multi-tenure conservation landscapes have markedly altered the environmental stage that shapes the structure of local carnivore assemblages. We explored assemblage-wide patterns of carnivore spatial (residual occupancy probability) and temporal (diel activity overlap) co-occurrence across three adjacent wildlife-oriented management contexts-a provincial protected area, a private ecotourism reserve, and commercial game ranches. We found that carnivores were generally distributed independently across space, but existing spatial dependencies were context-specific. Spatial overlap was most common in the protected area, where species occur at higher relative abundances, and in game ranches, where predator persecution presumably narrows the scope for spatial asymmetries. In the private reserve, spatial co-occurrence patterns were more heterogeneous but did not follow a dominance hierarchy associated with higher apex predator densities. Pair-specific variability suggests that subordinate carnivores may alternate between pre-emptive behavioral strategies and fine-scale co-occurrence with dominant competitors. Consistency in species-pairs diel activity asynchrony suggested that temporal overlap patterns in our study areas mostly depend on species' endogenous clock rather than the local context. Collectively, our research highlights the complexity and context-dependency of guild-level implications of current management and conservation paradigms; specifically, the unheeded potential for interventions to influence the local network of carnivore interactions with unknown population-level and cascading effects.
食肉动物种内动态取决于环境亲和力和种间相互作用的复杂相互作用。由于相互作用的物种组合和环境条件各不相同，通常预期会存在上下文依赖性，但很少有实证描述。在南非，分散的保护方法以及由此产生的多权属保护景观显著改变了塑造当地食肉动物群落结构的环境舞台。我们探讨了三种相邻的以野生动物为导向的管理背景下——一个省级保护区、一个私人生态旅游保护区和商业狩猎牧场——食肉动物空间（剩余占用概率）和时间（昼夜活动重叠）共现的群落范围模式。我们发现，食肉动物通常在空间上独立分布，但现有的空间依赖性是特定于上下文的。空间重叠在保护区最为常见，那里物种相对丰度较高，在狩猎牧场也很常见，那里对捕食者的迫害可能缩小了空间不对称的范围。在私人保护区，空间共现模式更加多样化，但并不遵循与较高顶级食肉动物密度相关的优势等级制度。特定配对的变异性表明，从属食肉动物可能在抢先行为策略和与优势竞争者的精细尺度共现之间交替。物种对昼夜活动异步性的一致性表明，我们研究区域的时间重叠模式主要取决于物种的生物钟，而不是当地环境。总体而言，我们的研究突出了当前管理和保护范式在群落水平影响方面的复杂性和上下文依赖性；具体而言，干预措施对影响食肉动物相互作用的当地网络具有未被重视的潜力，且具有未知的种群水平和级联效应。
