Today's talk
An evaluation of the surrogate species approach to increase the economical
effectiveness of monitoring programs
Luca Börger
Outline
Conservationists often have to obtain information and manage species or habitats which are difficult and expensive to survey. The surrogate species concept (and related ones such as umbrella or indicator species) are appealing approaches for this task. A further extension of these approaches are so-called coarse-filter approaches, where habitats/vegetation types or ecological communities are used as surrogates for the species or species assemblages (Wiens et al. 2008).
The usefulness and applicability of these concepts is, however, highly contentious (Cushman et al. 2010; Favreau et al. 2006; Hager et al. 2006; Hamilton et al. 2012; Murphy et al. 2011; Roberge and Angelstam 2004; Stark et al. 2012), with a recent review concluding that there likely is merit to these concepts as conservation tactic but additional empirical testing will be necessary (Branton & Richardson 2011). Specifically, it is necessary (i) to evaluate how best to detect and quantify the co-occurrence patterns, (ii) quantify the spatio-temporal bounds and transferability of these relationships, and (iii) investigate if there are also differences between survey types (Lindenmayer & Likens 2011; Quinn et al. 2011).
I address these issues for waterbird species in the boreal forest of Ontario, by developing new approaches, applied to large scale bird survey data in the Ontario Shield ecozone. Time permitting, I will show also ongoing work applied to bird communities in agricultural areas.
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