RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Global mammalian zooregions reveal a signal of past human impacts
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 586313
DO 10.1101/586313
A1 Marta Rueda
A1 Manuela González-Suárez
A1 Eloy Revilla
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/24/586313.abstract
AB Understanding how the world’s biodiversity is organized and how it changes across geographic regions is critical to predicting the effects of global change1. Ecologists have long documented that the world’s terrestrial fauna is organized hierarchically in large regions - or realms - and continental scale subregions2–6, with boundaries shaped by geographic and climatic factors2,7. However, little is known about how global biodiversity is assembled below the continental level and the factors, including the potential role of human impacts, triggering faunistic differences as the biogeographical scale becomes smaller. Here we show that the hierarchical organization of global zoogeographical regions extends coherently below the region level to reach a local scale, and that multiple determinants act across varying spatial and temporal scales. Among these determinants, anthropogenic land use during the Late Holocene stands out showing a footprint across biogeographical scales and explaining 22% of the faunistic differences among the larger bioregions. The Late Holocene coincided with the development of large cities and substantial transformation of ecosystems into agricultural land8,9. Our results show that past human activity has played a role in the global organization of present-day animal assemblages, leaving a detectable signal that warns us about significant time-lag effects of human-mediated impacts on biodiversity.