Landscape level monitoring of species abundance and distribution

Managing at landscape levels is acquiring increasing importance. Metapopulation management, maintaining transfrontier protected areas and softening the agricultural matrix is considered priority items. It is against this backdrop that I found a recent paper by Julia P. G. Jones titled “Monitoring species abundance and distribution at the landscape scale” very useful. In this paper the authors address some of the challenges presented by monitoring at the landscape scale, how models of species distribution can be used to inform policy, and discuss how monitoring at the global-scale could be approached. 

Collecting data over large areas is time consuming and costly. The authors present ideas for low-cost approaches against what they call “more data-hungry methods “ (indices of abundance vs. direct density estimates, and species distribution models built from presence-only vs. presence/absence data). 

Occupancy modelling is a useful approach for landscape-scale monitoring. It is a relatively low-cost operation .The authors discuss challenges, such as non-random sampling locations and periodical unavailability for detection, in using detection/non-detection data for monitoring species distribution. The researchers say such data can also provide estimates of abundance and show how existing models can be modified to allow the abundance of multiple species to be estimated simultaneously.

The researchers contend that models of species distribution can be used to project likely future scenarios and thus inform conservation planning where distributions are likely to change because of climate change or changing disturbance patterns.

Monitoring is needed for many purposes including auditing past management decisions and getting to know about future options. The authors’ sign off saying “recent global targets for conservation require monitoring which can report trends at the global-scale. Integrating data collected at a variety of scales to draw robust inference at the scale required is a challenge which deserves more attention from applied ecologists”.

Monitoring species abundance and distribution at the landscape scale

Julia P. G. Jones

Journal of Applied Ecology

Article first published online: 7 JAN 2011    DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2010.01917.x