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Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion
Agricultural expansion drives biodiversity loss globally, but impact assessments are biased towards recent time periods. This can lead to a gross underestimation of species declines in response to habitat loss, especially when species declines are gradual and occur over long time periods. Using Cold...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7287353/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32429811 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2897 |
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author | Munteanu, Catalina Kamp, Johannes Nita, Mihai Daniel Klein, Nadja Kraemer, Benjamin M. Müller, Daniel Koshkina, Alyona Prishchepov, Alexander V. Kuemmerle, Tobias |
author_facet | Munteanu, Catalina Kamp, Johannes Nita, Mihai Daniel Klein, Nadja Kraemer, Benjamin M. Müller, Daniel Koshkina, Alyona Prishchepov, Alexander V. Kuemmerle, Tobias |
author_sort | Munteanu, Catalina |
collection | PubMed |
description | Agricultural expansion drives biodiversity loss globally, but impact assessments are biased towards recent time periods. This can lead to a gross underestimation of species declines in response to habitat loss, especially when species declines are gradual and occur over long time periods. Using Cold War spy satellite images (Corona), we show that a grassland keystone species, the bobak marmot (Marmota bobak), continues to respond to agricultural expansion that happened more than 50 years ago. Although burrow densities of the bobak marmot today are highest in croplands, densities declined most strongly in areas that were persistently used as croplands since the 1960s. This response to historical agricultural conversion spans roughly eight marmot generations and suggests the longest recorded response of a mammal species to agricultural expansion. We also found evidence for remarkable philopatry: nearly half of all burrows retained their exact location since the 1960s, and this was most pronounced in grasslands. Our results stress the need for farsighted decisions, because contemporary land management will affect biodiversity decades into the future. Finally, our work pioneers the use of Corona historical Cold War spy satellite imagery for ecology. This vastly underused global remote sensing resource provides a unique opportunity to expand the time horizon of broad-scale ecological studies. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7287353 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-72873532020-06-12 Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion Munteanu, Catalina Kamp, Johannes Nita, Mihai Daniel Klein, Nadja Kraemer, Benjamin M. Müller, Daniel Koshkina, Alyona Prishchepov, Alexander V. Kuemmerle, Tobias Proc Biol Sci Global Change and Conservation Agricultural expansion drives biodiversity loss globally, but impact assessments are biased towards recent time periods. This can lead to a gross underestimation of species declines in response to habitat loss, especially when species declines are gradual and occur over long time periods. Using Cold War spy satellite images (Corona), we show that a grassland keystone species, the bobak marmot (Marmota bobak), continues to respond to agricultural expansion that happened more than 50 years ago. Although burrow densities of the bobak marmot today are highest in croplands, densities declined most strongly in areas that were persistently used as croplands since the 1960s. This response to historical agricultural conversion spans roughly eight marmot generations and suggests the longest recorded response of a mammal species to agricultural expansion. We also found evidence for remarkable philopatry: nearly half of all burrows retained their exact location since the 1960s, and this was most pronounced in grasslands. Our results stress the need for farsighted decisions, because contemporary land management will affect biodiversity decades into the future. Finally, our work pioneers the use of Corona historical Cold War spy satellite imagery for ecology. This vastly underused global remote sensing resource provides a unique opportunity to expand the time horizon of broad-scale ecological studies. The Royal Society 2020-05-27 2020-05-20 /pmc/articles/PMC7287353/ /pubmed/32429811 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2897 Text en © 2020 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Global Change and Conservation Munteanu, Catalina Kamp, Johannes Nita, Mihai Daniel Klein, Nadja Kraemer, Benjamin M. Müller, Daniel Koshkina, Alyona Prishchepov, Alexander V. Kuemmerle, Tobias Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion |
title | Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion |
title_full | Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion |
title_fullStr | Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion |
title_full_unstemmed | Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion |
title_short | Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion |
title_sort | cold war spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion |
topic | Global Change and Conservation |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7287353/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32429811 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2897 |
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