دانلود رایگان مقاله تاثیر منفی فعالیت های انسانی بر توزیع ونجلتس

ABSTRACT

The Southern Gobi of Mongolia is an iconic ungulate stronghold that supports the world's largest populations of Asiatic wild ass (or khulan – Equus hemionus) and goitered gazelle (Gazella subgutturosa). A growing human population, intensifying exploitation of natural resources, and the development of infrastructure in the region place increasing pressure on these species and their habitats. During 2012–2015, we studied factors influencing the distribution of these two ungulate species in the Southern Gobi to better inform management. We built Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) to predict the location of suitable habitat for the two species using environmental and human-associated factors. These models were validated using independent telemetry data for each species. The GLMMs suggest that the probability of ungulate presence decreased with increasing human influence and increased in areas with intermediate values of elevation and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (except for goitered gazelle). Notably, human-associated factors were more important than environmental variables in explaining the distribution of the two species. Habitat models predicted between 45 and 55% of the study area to be suitable for khulan and between 50 and 55% suitable for goitered gazelles during 2012–2015. Models for both species had good predictive power, as nearly 90% of khulan and 100% of goitered gazelle telemetry locations from separate data sets were found within the predicted preferred areas. Our approach quantifies the key drivers of their distribution and our findings are useful for policy makers, managers, and industry to plan mitigation measures to reduce the impacts of development.

4. Discussion

Mining development is projected to continue to increase in the Southern Gobi and elsewhere in Mongolia (Walton, 2010) and thus is set to become a major driver of land-use change. As such, there is a pressing need for assessments of the nature of impacts on wildlife and the spatial extent to which these impacts extend. Spatial distribution of khulan and goitered gazelles was influenced predominantly by human disturbance, the presence of households, and to a lesser degree by elevation preferring areas associated with intermediate values of this variable; for khulan intermediate values of vegetation productivity (NDVI) were an additional factor. Our results advance understanding of how animals respond to a various environmental and human associated covariates, offering important insights for the implementation of measures to mitigate the impacts of human land-use change associated with development.