Fellow Maria Lumbierres gave a talk entitled Global patterns of mammals’ distribution based on a new set of Area of Habitat maps on 17 June 2021 during a symposium of the online 100th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists. She was also the Moderator of the Symposium III called Global Trends in Mammals.
You can find the programme here.
[Oral presentation] Maria Lumbierres, Prabhat R. Dahal, Moreno Di Marco, Stuart H.M. Butchart, Paul F. Donald, Carlo Rondinini (2021),Global patterns of mammals’ distribution based on a new set of Area of Habitat maps, Symposium III Global Trends in Mammals, 100th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists, online.
Abstract:
The current rate of biodiversity loss is over 1,000 times higher than background levels; therefore, finding mechanisms to identify where species are located is an urgent matter. Several approaches have been developed to map global species distributions, but accurate spatial data are only available for a limited number of species. At the global scales, the most comprehensive assessment of species distributions are the IUCN Red List geographical ranges, however, they usually suffer from commission errors. Area of Habitat (AOH) is defined as the habitat available to a species, that is, habitat within its range. It is produced by subtracting unsuitable areas from range maps, using data on each species’ associations with land cover and altitude, and attempting to reduce the commission errors in the range maps. To map habitats, we developed a novel data-driven translation model between the IUCN Red List Habitats Classification Scheme and the Copernicus Global Land Service Land Cover, using a logistic regression model. We present a new set of global AOH maps for all the terrestrial mammals at 100m resolution. These maps allowed us to determine the global distribution of mammals at a finer resolution than what could be obtained using ranges. Having fine-resolution distribution maps can help us to guide conservation action worldwide, especially site-based conservation.