Biological Conservation

Given the increasing threats to biodiversity and limited resources for conservation, our knowledge about the uncertainty in surrogates for representing comprehensively the spatial conservation priorities for biodiversity, needs to be improved. We present the data of a comprehensive spatial conservation approach for Neotropical biodiversity by including surrogates for three biodiversity attributes: composition (8563 species), structure (663 ecosystems), and function (5382 ecological groups). We evaluated the differences in the representativeness and surrogacy-level of resulting portfolios for each attribute, considering the differences for current established conservation areas (CAs), prioritized areas (PRAs; those selected to complement the CAs), and total areas (TAs: CAs + PRAs). The assessment included the entire Neotropics, and a regionalization approach using the Global 200 Ecoregions by country. Finally, we identified critical areas for conservation based on the coincidence of irreplaceable PRAs among biodiversity attributes. Our results confirm the premise that no single surrogate represents biodiversity comprehensively, providing quantitative evidence to support the importance of using integrative information of surrogates for different levels of biodiversity into identifying priority areas for conservation. The spatial mismatch in the portfolios of areas shows how the use of a single level of biodiversity would lead to the omission of conservation priorities for other levels. We also identified critical areas for conservation where irreplaceable spatial priorities of the different biodiversity attributes matched. These areas coincided with known critical and threatened global biodiversity hotspots, and are mostly located in the Chaco, the Atlantic Forest, the Pantanal, Cerrado, and Caatinga regions, and the moist and dry forests of the northern Andes and Mesoamerica.

An individual-based, spatially-explicit, discrete time model of rabies and canine distemper transmission through a naïve population of San Clemente Island foxes. Code written in Program R. Sanchez, JN & BR Hudgens. 2019. Impacts of heterogeneous host densities and contact rates on pathogen transmission in the Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis). Biological Conservation. 236:593–603. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2019.05.045 Sanchez, JN & BR Hudgens. 2015. Interactions between density, home range behaviors, and contact rates in the Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis). Ecology and Evolution 5(12):2466–2477. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.1533

Data and R script associated with the article "Do bats seek clean water? A perspective on biodiversity from the Namib Desert." https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108686 File WaterSampling_Cleaned_Feb2020.csv and waterClass.csv contain data associated with water quality. File WaterSampling_BatData_NoNoise.csv provides bat species identifications from the acoustic dataset. File Laverty_Do bats seek clean water.R includes the R script that produced the results provided in our publication. Please send questions/comments to theresalaverty@gmail.com

UPDATED VERSION 29/5/2020: Data and R scripts for the spatial mark-resight modelling of feral cat density in the Western Otway Ranges, 2017.

This data has pathogen (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) loads from an experiment comparing temperature to disease. Frogs of three species are allocated to 1 of 3 temperatures, being in either a Bd-exposed treatment or control (unexposed).

Species lists and species traits of carabid beetles analysed in Knapp et al. (2020) - Biological Conservation

This folder contains malleefowl nest counts from 128 sites across Australia over 28 years. It also contains an R script to estimate trends and drivers of nest activity over this period while using interval censoring to account for uncertain nest counts.

This is the final result data of the paper 'Where Marine Protected Areas would best represent 30% of ocean biodiversity'. The side length of each cell is 100 km along lat and lon. In the tif file the priority value in each cell from low to high is from '0' to '1'. The cells in the first row & column and last row & column are no data cells (having the value '-1' as the same as the land cells) due to the necessity of Zonation algorithm. The top 30% prioritized cells were selected as the 'the Prioritized Area' in the paper.

Data used to model 3 grassland songbirds (Horned Lark, Savannah Sparrow, Vesper Sparrow) occupying cropland territories.

Water Friendly Farming: macrophyte gamma diversity (presence/absence) data collected from all waterbody types and nature based measures for the period 2010-2018.