Persistence of Large Mammal Faunas as Indicators of Global Human Impacts

By J. Morrison, W. Sechrest, E. Dinerstein, D. Wilcove, John F. Lamoreux. 2007

273 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Large mammals often play critical roles within ecosystems by affecting either prey populations or the structure and species composition of surrounding vegetation. However, large mammals are highly vulnerable to extirpation by humans and consequently, severe contractions of species ranges result in intact large mammal faunas becoming increasingly rare. We compared historical (AD 1500) range maps of large mammals with their current distributions to determine which areas today retain complete assemblages of large mammals. We estimate that less than 21% of the earth's terrestrial surface still contains all of the large (>20 kg) mammals it once held, with the proportion varying between 68% in Australasia to only 1% in Indomalaya. Although the presence of large mammals offers no guarantee of the presence of all smaller animals, their absence represents an ecologically based measurement of human impacts on biodiversity. Given the ecological importance of large mammals and their vulnerability to extinction, better protection and extension of sites containing complete assemblages of large mammals is urgently needed.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0bc1226c8c70d6324a1c9d887861e473d546be19

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology

Citations in the corpus

Emptying the Forest: Hunting and the Extirpation of Wildlife from Tropical Nature Reserves (2011, background): “Only about 35%, 9%, and 1% of the Neotropic, Afrotropic, and Indo–Malayan regions, respectively, harbor intact megafaunal (more than 20 kilograms) communities (Morrison et al. 2007).”
Maintaining tiger connectivity and minimizing extinction into the next century: Insights from landscape genetics and spatially-explicit simulations (2017, background): “Most mammals retain less than half of their historical range, resulting in substantial population decline and habitat fragmentation (Morrison et al. 2007; Dirzo et al. 2014).”
Interference competition between gray wolves and coyotes in Yellowstone National Park (2009, background): “Most flora and fauna documented when YNP was established are present today, including all large ungulates and carnivores (Schullery 1996; Pritchard 1999; Morrison et al. 2007).”
Bird dietary guild richness across latitudes, environments and biogeographic regions (2012, background): “Similarly, the strong environmentally independent biogeographic effect on scavenger richness and their peak in East Africa corresponds to the peak in the abundance and species richness of large mammals (Morrison et al., 2007).”
Functional connectivity within conservation networks: Delineating corridors for African elephants (2013, background): “Consequently, many large mammal species are restricted to protected areas or areas with low human density (Morrison et al. 2007).”
Global decline in aggregated migrations of large terrestrial mammals (2009, methodology): “MATERIALS AND METHODS We concentrated on terrestrial mammals with body mass >20 kg (Morrison et al. 2007).”