European Bison habitat in the Carpathian Mountains

By Tobias Kuemmerle, K. Perzanowski, Oleh Chaskovskyy, Katarzyna Ostapowicz, Ľ. Halada, Andriy-Taras Bashta, Ivan Kruhlov, Patrick Hostert, D. Waller, Volker C. Radeloff. 2010

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract European Bison (Bison bonasus) barely escaped extinction in the early 20th century and now only occur in small isolated herds scattered across Central and Eastern Europe. The species’ survival in the wild depends on identifying suitable habitat for establishing bison metapopulations via reintroductions of new herds. We assessed European Bison habitat across the Carpathian Mountains, a stronghold of European Bison and one of the only places where a viable bison metapopulation may be possible. We used maximum entropy models to analyze herd range maps and habitat use data from radio-collared bison to identify key habitat variables and map European Bison habitat across the entire Carpathian ecoregion (210,000 km2). Forest cover (primarily core and perforated forests) and variables linked to human disturbance best predict bison habitat suitability. Bison show no clear preference for particular forest types but prefer managed grasslands over fallow and abandoned fields. Several large, suitable, but currently unoccupied habitat patches exist, particularly in the eastern Carpathians. This available suitable habitat suggests that European Bison have an opportunity to establish a viable Carpathian metapopulation, especially if recent trends of declining human pressure and reforestation of abandoned farmland continue. Our results also confirm the suitability of a proposed Romanian reintroduction site. Establishing the first European Bison metapopulation would be a milestone in efforts to conserve this species in the wild and demonstrate a significant and hopeful step towards conserving large grazers and their ecological roles in human-dominated landscapes across the globe.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b752511d4673c363d5005c653c7fb90bab3bbd12

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Citations in the corpus

Using species distribution modelling to disentangle realised versus potential distributions for rare species conservation (2013, methodology): “Since the aim of this study is not explanatory but predictive and since predictive performance does not seem to be affected by collinearity when using Maxent (Kuemmerle et al., 2010), all predictors were kept when modelling and no collinearity analysis between predictors was done.”
The importance of correcting for sampling bias in MaxEnt species distribution models (2013, background): “Topographical heterogeneity influences the microclimate, local hiding place availability and terrain inaccessibility (human hunters, predators) and might be positively associated with species presence (e.g. Kuemmerle et al., 2010; Pedersen et al., 2007).”
Earth observation satellite sensors for biodiversity monitoring: potentials and bottlenecks (2014, background): “Herd distribution, migration pathways and habitat conditions of other larger mammals such as bison (Ware, Terletzky, and Adler 2014; Kuemmerle et al. 2010), reindeer (Kivinen and Kumpula 2014), cattle (Raizman et al. 2013), and smaller livestock such as sheep and goats (Röder et al. 2008) have also…”