Evaluating the functionality of expert-assessed wildlife corridors with genetic data from roe deer

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• 作者：Stephanie Burkart^a ; Felix Gugerli^a ; Josef Senn^a ; Ralph Kuehn^b ; ^c ; Janine Bolliger^a ; ^{janine.bolliger@wsl.ch" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author}
• 关键词：Classification uncertainty ; Fragmentation ; Functional connectivity ; Genetic structure ; Landscape genetics ; Landscape permeability ; Nuclear microsatellites ; Capreolus capreolus
• 刊名：Basic and Applied Ecology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：February 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：17
• 期：1
• 页码：52-60
• 全文大小：2624 K

文摘

Traffic infrastructure such as fenced motorways may reduce functional connectivity by impeding the movement of wildlife and thus reduce gene flow across landscapes. This may result in increased genetic differentiation, eventually leading to decreasing genetic diversity in wildlife populations owing to genetic drift. Landscape managers and conservation agencies apply a range of measures to mitigate such adverse effects in intensively managed landscapes. Efficient measures to facilitate landscape permeability for wildlife include expert-assessed wildlife corridors. However, whether wildlife corridors are used as such and whether they fulfill their purpose remains largely unknown. Here, we evaluated whether the expert-based categorization of wildlife corridors into functional, impaired and interrupted held true in the Swiss Plateau by testing the landscape's permeability using genetic assessments. We identified the spatial genetic structure of roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and tested, whether the estimated gene flow supported the expert categorization of wildlife corridors. Among the four study regions (ca. 300–2600 km²), pairwise genetic differentiation was rather low (F_ST ranging between 0.008 and 0.0264). However, wildlife corridors identified as intact on the basis of expert evaluation showed higher gene flow between populations of roe deer (mean F_ST = 0.008) than corridors classified as impaired or interrupted (mean F_ST = 0.022). Thus, expert judgement on the functionality of wildlife corridors could be generally confirmed by our genetic assessment on the permeability of landscapes for roe deer. This shows that genetic methods may constitute a useful set of tools to identify the state of management measures and to prioritize action plans for maintaining functional wildlife corridors across landscapes.