HABITAT CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR ASSOCIATION WITH WILDLIFE SPECIES DIVERSITY AND ABUNDANCE
Abstract
Habitat features are vital to the diversity and abundance of wildlife species in ecological systems. A secondary ecological data set was used to assess the relationship between wildlife biodiversity and ecological realm, climate, biome, protected-area status, taxonomic group, species richness, abundance, sampling effort and study area. A total of 267 records of wildlife use were analysed after excluding plant and fungal records. To examine biodiversity patterns under ecological conditions, descriptive statistics, comparisons of groups, correlation analysis and multivariable regression were used. There were considerable differences in wildlife species richness and abundance between ecological realms and climatic categories, and values in the marine category were generally higher than those for the freshwater and terrestrial categories. Unadjusted analyses also revealed that there were significant differences between protected and unprotected records, but those differences were not as great after adjusting for ecological and sampling characteristics. The species richness was positively associated with the total abundance, sampling effort and study area and the abundance with the number of samples. Ecological realm and sampling characteristics were also important for explaining variation in observed biodiversity patterns in the multivariable analysis. These results show that diversity and abundance of wildlife are determined by a range of habitat, environmental and methodological factors. Habitat quality, ecological context, landscape characteristics and standardised approaches to sampling should therefore all be taken into account when assessing wildlife communities for the purpose of effective biodiversity assessment and conservation planning.
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