Challenges and Opportunities for Terrapene carolina carolina Under Different Climate Scenarios

Abstract

An unprecedented rate of global climate change as a result of human impacts has affected both endotherms and ectotherms. This is of special concern for ectotherms, such as reptiles, as these species are suffering from large population declines and lack the dispersal ability of other taxa. There are many protected areas across the United States; however, these areas are fragmented, which hinders dispersal. We examined species distribution and dispersal capabilities for Terrapene carolina carolina, a relatively narrow range, low dispersal, and vulnerable species. We created climatic suitability models to predict changes in suitable habitat and identified important predictor variables. We modeled three time periods using MaxEnt and hypothesized that there would be an increase in northern habitat. We found that most of the suitable habitat changed at the northern end of the range and that mean temperature of driest quarter had the most influence on future predictions. Overall there were relatively moderate changes in suitable habitat, but where these changes occur affects accessibility. As an example, we examined these local scale movements within Oak Openings Region and found that individuals are capable of dispersing to new suitable habitats; however, other physical barriers will hinder movements. In conclusion, there is a critical need to protect this vulnerable reptilian species and our results suggest that T. c. carolina will expand their distribution northward. We suggest that land managers increase connectivity among protected areas to facilitate dispersal, but future studies should incorporate other dynamic ecological factors at finer spatial scale.

Editorial for Special Issue “Remote Sensing for Monitoring Wildlife and Habitat in a Changing World”

“…The works included in this Special Issue present some scientific and technological innovations in remote sensing for assessing the spatio-temporal dynamics of wildlife species and their habitats. Although constituting a very small set of studies, they cover a diverse array of geographic settings distributed throughout the world and comprising both terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16].…”

“…Although constituting a very small set of studies, they cover a diverse array of geographic settings distributed throughout the world and comprising both terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16]. These studies used diverse analytical Remote Sens.…”

“…terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16].…”

“…terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16]. These studies used diverse analytical approaches applied to remotely sensed data acquired by different sensor systems at different scales ranging from high spatial resolution sensors onboard unoccupied aircraft vehicles [16], underwater systems [15], and space-borne vehicles [12], to intermediate spatial resolution multispectral imagery acquired by operational satellite sensor systems such as the Landsat [6][7][8]10,11,14], SPOT [7], and MODIS [8,13] satellite series, together with coarser spatial resolution data acquired by weather satellite systems [9].…”

“…They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16]. These studies used diverse analytical approaches applied to remotely sensed data acquired by different sensor systems at different scales ranging from high spatial resolution sensors onboard unoccupied aircraft vehicles [16], underwater systems [15], and space-borne vehicles [12], to intermediate spatial resolution multispectral imagery acquired by operational satellite sensor systems such as the Landsat [6][7][8]10,11,14], SPOT [7], and MODIS [8,13] satellite series, together with coarser spatial resolution data acquired by weather satellite systems [9]. This diverse array of sensors and analytical approaches proved useful for evaluating habitat requirements and distribution [7,8,10,12,16], species distribution and occurrence [11,15], population dynamics [7], human-wildlife conflicts [13,14], the negative impacts of natural [9] and human-driven [8] disturbances on species distribution, and for assessing the potential impacts of climate change [6].…”