Movement and Demography of At-Risk Butterflies: Building Blocks for Conservation

Schultz, Cheryl B.; Haddad, Nick M.; Henry, Erica H.; Crone, Elizabeth E.

doi:10.1146/annurev-ento-011118-112204

Cited by 38 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…A dramatic example was the discovery and description in 2005 of six new species of mites found among the feathers of museum specimens of the long extinct Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) (48). Similarly, closely linked pairs of species involved in relationships like pollination may become extinct simultaneously (49)(50)(51). Thus, moving onto the brink is an important part of the process of defaunation (14).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction

Ceballos

Ehrlich

Raven

2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

615

370

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The ongoing sixth mass species extinction is the result of the destruction of component populations leading to eventual extirpation of entire species. Populations and species extinctions have severe implications for society through the degradation of ecosystem services. Here we assess the extinction crisis from a different perspective. We examine 29,400 species of terrestrial vertebrates, and determine which are on the brink of extinction because they have fewer than 1,000 individuals. There are 515 species on the brink (1.7% of the evaluated vertebrates). Around 94% of the populations of 77 mammal and bird species on the brink have been lost in the last century. Assuming all species on the brink have similar trends, more than 237,000 populations of those species have vanished since 1900. We conclude the human-caused sixth mass extinction is likely accelerating for several reasons. First, many of the species that have been driven to the brink will likely become extinct soon. Second, the distribution of those species highly coincides with hundreds of other endangered species, surviving in regions with high human impacts, suggesting ongoing regional biodiversity collapses. Third, close ecological interactions of species on the brink tend to move other species toward annihilation when they disappear—extinction breeds extinctions. Finally, human pressures on the biosphere are growing rapidly, and a recent example is the current coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, linked to wildlife trade. Our results reemphasize the extreme urgency of taking much-expanded worldwide actions to save wild species and humanity’s crucial life-support systems from this existential threat.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction

Ceballos

Ehrlich

Raven

2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

615

370

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“…4). Habitat-dependent movement rates have so far only be quantified for a minority of species hampering conservation management efforts (Schultz et al 2019) and those containing changing activity levels are even fewer. IBMs, such as presented here, provide a useful platform to improve predictions of movement across complex landscapes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This may limit our understanding of the effects of motivation, activity or resources density on movement rates as they may differ between substantially between habitats and sexes (Reim et al 2019). The effects of changing behaviour in movement models can have strong effects on their predictions (Lima and Zollner 1996;Morales and Ellner 2002;Pauli et al 2013) and habitatdependent changes in movement rates have been quantified for only a small minority of species (Zalucki and Kitching 1982;Odendaal et al 1989;Roland et al 2000;Fownes and Roland 2002;Schtickzelle et al 2007;Ovaskainen et al 2008b;Schultz et al 2019). Further, the additional benefit of explicit representation of activity budgets, such as duration of flight and periods of inactivity within individual-based models (IBMs), has been recently demonstrated by explaining variation in intraspecific dispersal rate (Brown and Crone 2016b) and the responses of butterflies to changing weather conditions (Evans et al 2019a).…”

Section: Electronic Supplementary Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of including habitat-specific behaviour in models of butterfly movement

et al. 2020

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Dispersal is a key process affecting population persistence and major factors affecting dispersal rates are the amounts, connectedness and properties of habitats in landscapes. We present new data on the butterfly Maniola jurtina in flower-rich and flower-poor habitats that demonstrates how movement and behaviour differ between sexes and habitat types, and how this effects consequent dispersal rates. Females had higher flight speeds than males, but their total time in flight was four times less. The effect of habitat type was strong for both sexes, flight speeds were ~ 2.5 × and ~ 1.7 × faster on resource-poor habitats for males and females, respectively, and flights were approximately 50% longer. With few exceptions females oviposited in the mown grass habitat, likely because growing grass offers better food for emerging caterpillars, but they foraged in the resource-rich habitat. It seems that females faced a trade-off between ovipositing without foraging in the mown grass or foraging without ovipositing where flowers were abundant. We show that taking account of habitat-dependent differences in activity, here categorised as flight or non-flight, is crucial to obtaining good fits of an individual-based model to observed movement. An important implication of this finding is that incorporating habitat-specific activity budgets is likely necessary for predicting longer-term dispersal in heterogeneous habitats, as habitat-specific behaviour substantially influences the mean (> 30% difference) and kurtosis (1.4 × difference) of dispersal kernels. The presented IBMs provide a simple method to explicitly incorporate known activity and movement rates when predicting dispersal in changing and heterogeneous landscapes.

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“…Few studies on at‐risk insects assess the demographic responses to restoration tools (Schultz et al ). For some species, restoration approaches lead to short‐term costs and longer‐term gain.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demographic costs and benefits of herbicide‐based restoration to enhance habitat for an endangered butterfly and a threatened plant

Schultz

Ferguson²

2020

Restoration Ecology

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Restoring habitat degraded by invasive species is often a primary focus of conservation strategies, yet few studies investigate the effects of invasive species control on multiple at-risk taxa. Selective herbicides are increasingly used because they can selectively reduce aggressive invasive plant species with the aim of minimizing effects on other taxa within the habitat. We conducted a four-year experiment to test how annual application of grass-specific herbicide affected the demography on Fender's blue butterfly (Icaricia icarioides fenderi) and Kincaid's lupine (Lupinus oreganus), two federally protected species which persist in highly degraded prairie remnants in western Oregon, USA. Effects of herbicide application were transitory for the butterfly; reduction of invasive grasses increased fecundity and led to higher annual population growth ( ) at one of two conservation areas in the first season. There were no detectable differences in in subsequent seasons-suggesting that treatments caused neither extensive harm nor extensive benefit to the butterfly population. For the lupine, there were no detectable differences in leaf and flower abundance between control and herbicide treatments. However, greater seed production in herbicide plots in the first and third seasons suggests that lupines in herbicide-treated plots have greater potential reproductive success. While treatments do not have a long-term benefit to annual population growth for the butterfly, increasing reproductive success of the threatened plant may justify integrating this strategy into restoration plans. Considering the impact of restoration practices on the demography of multiple at-risk taxa within a community is critical to effective recovery strategies. Key words: Fender's blue butterfly (Icaricia (=Plebejus) icarioides fenderi), full annual cycle, Kincaid's lupine (Lupinus oreganus), nontarget effects of herbicides, prairie restoration, vital rates Implications for Practice• Restoration plans which use herbicide-based management should consider the effects of treatments on the full annual cycle of focal species as well as effects on interacting trophic levels within the community. • Multi-year monitoring is essential; herbicide-based management may have initial desirable effects, but these effects may be temporary. • Full-life cycle monitoring integrates effects of restoration treatments over one or more generations to project net effects of restoration actions on focal species. • Multi-year and multi-site demographic response of at-risk species to restoration actions provides insight into the generality and utility of management actions, especially when actions cause both costs and benefits and vary across years.

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Movement and Demography of At-Risk Butterflies: Building Blocks for Conservation

Cited by 38 publications

References 99 publications

Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction

Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction

The importance of including habitat-specific behaviour in models of butterfly movement

Demographic costs and benefits of herbicide‐based restoration to enhance habitat for an endangered butterfly and a threatened plant

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