Niche opportunity created by land cover change is driving the European hare invasion in the Neotropics
- PDF / 1,617,166 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 50 Downloads / 172 Views
(0123456789().,-volV) ( 01234567 89().,-volV)
ORIGINAL PAPER
Niche opportunity created by land cover change is driving the European hare invasion in the Neotropics Nielson Pasqualotto . Danilo Boscolo . Natalia F. Versiani . Roberta M. Paolino Thiago F. Rodrigues . Victor G. Krepschi . Adriano G. Chiarello
.
Received: 30 December 2019 / Accepted: 23 August 2020 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The European hare (Lepus europaeus) was introduced in the late 19th century in Argentina and has since rapidly expanded northwards, currently occupying the Brazilian south and southeast. Although European hare is known to be a farmland specialist in its native Europe, what habitat types or landscape features are facilitating its expansion in the Neotropics are not yet clear. Here we assessed support to the disturbance and biotic resistance hypotheses as general drivers of this invasion. We sampled with cameratraps and track surveys 205 sites in three landscapes in southeastern Brazil. We used occupancy models that corrected for both false positive and false negative Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-020-02353-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. N. Pasqualotto (&) R. M. Paolino T. F. Rodrigues Programa Interunidades de Po´s-Graduac¸a˜o em Ecologia Aplicada (PPGI-EA), Escola Superior de Agricultura ‘‘Luiz de Queiroz’’ (ESALQ/USP) e Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura (CENA/USP), Universidade de Sa˜o Paulo, Piracicaba, Sa˜o Paulo, Brasil e-mail: [email protected]
errors. The disturbance hypothesis was the top-ranked (w = 0.66) with the amount of field, sugarcane, and managed forests all affecting strongly and positively hare occupancy. Support to the biotic resistance hypothesis was lower (DAICc = 2.14; w = 0.23) and partial, since only native forests showed a negative effect on hare occupancy. Our findings indicate that in the expansion front occupancy of this invader is mainly dictated by niche opportunities created by native habitat transformation into agricultural lands. The biotic resistance imposed by remaining native habitats seems to play a secondary role and only due to native forests. We conclude that hare geographical expansion should increase given the prominent role of Brazil as a commodity producer and exporter. Nevertheless, fomenting forested protected areas and improving adherence of rural owners to the Brazilian D. Boscolo National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (IN-TREE), Brazil, http://intree.org/ V. G. Krepschi Instituto de Biocieˆncias, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), Rio Claro, SP, Brasil
Present Address: N. Pasqualotto D. Boscolo N. F. Versiani A. G. Chiarello Departamento de Biologia, Faculdade de Filosofia, Cieˆncias e Letras de Ribeira˜o Preto, Universidade de Sa˜o Paulo, Ribeira˜o Preto, Sa˜o Paulo, Brasil
123
N. Pasqualotto et al.
Forest Act, which protects for
Data Loading...
