A large-scale assessment of European rabbit damage to agriculture in Spain.

BACKGROUND: Numerous small and medium-sized mammal pests cause widespread and economically significant damage to crops all over the globe. However, most research on pest species has focused on accounts of the level of damage. There are fewer studies concentrating on the description of crop damage caused by pests at large geographical scales, or on analysis of the ecological and anthropogenic factors correlated with these observed patterns. We investigated the relationship between agricultural damage by the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and environmental and anthropogenic variables throughout Spain. RESULTS: Rabbit damage was mainly concentrated within the central-southern regions of Spain. We found that rabbit damage increased significantly between the early 2000s and 2013. Greater losses were typical of those areas where farming dominated and natural vegetation was scarce, where main railways and highways were present, and where environmental conditions were generally favourable for rabbit populations to proliferate. CONCLUSION: From our analysis, we suggest that roads and railway lines act as potential corridors along which rabbits can spread. The recent increase in Spain of such infrastructure may explain the rise in rabbit damage reported in this study. Our approach is valuable as a method for assessing drivers of wildlife pest damage at large spatial scales, and can be used to propose methods to reduce human - wildlife conflict. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.

Integrating sustainable hunting in biodiversity protection in Central Africa: hot spots, weak spots, and strong spots.

Wild animals are a primary source of protein (bushmeat) for people living in or near tropical forests. Ideally, the effect of bushmeat harvests should be monitored closely by making regular estimates of offtake rate and size of stock available for exploitation. However, in practice, this is possible in very few situations because it requires both of these aspects to be readily measurable, and even in the best case, entails very considerable time and effort. As alternative, in this study, we use high-resolution, environmental favorability models for terrestrial mammals (N = 165) in Central Africa to map areas of high species richness (hot spots) and hunting susceptibility. Favorability models distinguish localities with environmental conditions that favor the species' existence from those with detrimental characteristics for its presence. We develop an index for assessing Potential Hunting Sustainability (PHS) of each species based on their ecological characteristics (population density, habitat breadth, rarity and vulnerability), weighted according to restrictive and permissive assumptions of how species' characteristics are combined. Species are classified into five main hunting sustainability classes using fuzzy logic. Using the accumulated favorability values of all species, and their PHS values, we finally identify weak spots, defined as high diversity regions of especial hunting vulnerability for wildlife, as well as strong spots, defined as high diversity areas of high hunting sustainability potential. Our study uses relatively simple models that employ easily obtainable data of a species' ecological characteristics to assess the impacts of hunting in tropical regions. It provides information for management by charting the geography of where species are more or less likely to be at risk of extinction from hunting.

Long-term changes in game species over a long period of transformation in the Iberian Mediterranean landscape.

Agricultural change has transformed large areas of traditional farming landscapes, leading to important changes in the species community assemblages in most European countries. We suspect that the drastic changes in land-use that have occurred in Andalusia (southern Spain) over recent decades, may have affected the distribution and abundance of game species in this region. This article compares the distribution of the main game species in Andalusia during the 1960s and 1990s, using data from maps available from the Mainland Spanish Fish, Game and National Parks Service and from recent datasets on hunting yield distributions, respectively. Big-game and small-game species were significantly segregated in southern Spain during the 1990s, as two clearly independent chorotypes (groups of species whose abundances are similarly distributed) were obtained from the classification analysis. In contrast, big-game and small-game species were not significantly segregated several decades ago, when there was only one chorotype consisting of small-game species and wild boar. The other three ungulates did not constitute a significant chorotype, as they showed positive correlations with some species in the group mentioned above. These changes seem to be a consequence of the transformations that have occurred in the Iberian Mediterranean landscape over the last few decades. The abandoning of traditional activities, and the consequent formation of dense scrubland and woodland, has led to an expansion of big-game species, and a decrease of small-game species in mountain areas. Moreover, agricultural intensification has apparently depleted small-game species populations in some agricultural areas. On the other hand, the increasingly intensive hunting management could be artificially boosting this segregation between small-game and big-game species. Our results suggest that the conservation and regeneration of traditional agricultural landscapes (like those predominating in the 1960s) should be a priority for the conservation of small-game species.