Modelling the Impact of Climate and Land Use Changes on Wildlife by Integrated Distribution and Connectivity Analyses

Dear Colleagues,

Land use and climate change are recognized as the two major processes affecting the realized distribution of wildlife in the Anthropocene. The amount, spatial arrangement, and integrity of original habitats are increasingly being altered, relegating animal populations into fragmented and progressively more isolated habitat remnants. In turn, the disruption of individuals and genetic fluxes among populations trigger cascade effects that can end in the so-called extinction vortex. The resilience of animal populations in fragmented landscapes will thus strongly depend on the implementation of conservation actions that aim to preserve both populations’ refugia and the connections among them. Effective landscape and conservation planning should rely on a comprehensive evaluation of the independent and synergic effects of both land use and climate change. Nowadays, many modelling frameworks dealing with different sources of predictors exist to infer species distribution and functional connectivity among residual populations. In this Special Issue, we would like to collect research papers that adopt innovative methods to integrate species distribution and connectivity information in order to evaluate the effect of land use change, climate change, or their interaction on single species or multiple-species distribution. Research papers should be focused on, but not limited to, the following themes:

• proposal of new statistical methods that integrate multiple sources of data (e.g., camera traps/occurrence/capture-mark-recapture data)
• analysis of citizen science data
• large-scale or multiple-scales analysis
• analysis of time-series or space-for-time data to evaluate climate change effects on species distribution
• use of simulation techniques to assess model performance or to evaluate different scenarios
• prediction of the distribution of species or communities under different future scenarios
• analysis of the alteration of functional connectivity on species/communities distribution
• analysis of the effects of land use management on species/communities distribution
• analysis of movement data
• analysis of genetic data (landscape genetic approach)
• explicit account of possible biases (imperfect detection and sampling bias)
• overlooked environments, such as marine ecosystems (seascapes), wetlands, or desert oases.

Dr. Valerio Orioli
Dr. Olivia Dondina
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• connectivity
• detection probability
• dispersal
• ecological network
• ensemble models
• hierarchical models
• integrated models
• landscape scale
• movement
• multiple-scales
• species distribution model
• landscape genetic