ABSTRACT
Species loss and the decline of populations are among the most important threats to the preservation of ecosystem processes and their services to humans (Chapin et al. 2000). These threats will increase in the near future: even the most conservative estimates indicate that current extinction rates have no precedent since the Cretaceous event (Barnosky et al. 2011), thus supporting the idea that anthropogenic activity is triggering the sixth mass extinction on Earth. As an example, recent assessments of the status of animal species showed that, among all species included in the catalog of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 19% of vertebrates and 26% of invertebrates were threatened, and a large number of these move to a higher risk category every year (Hoffmann et al. 2010; Collen et al. 2012). Overall, diversity is suffering an additional reduction through the loss of
CONTENTS
8.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 151 8.2 Finding Species from Space...................................................................... 153 8.3 EO of Land Cover and Species Niches ................................................... 157
8.3.1 Species Distribution Modeling .................................................... 159 8.3.2 Global Species Assessment ........................................................... 161
8.4 Measuring Ecosystem Functioning in Animal Ecology and Conservation............................................................................................... 165 8.4.1 Relationships between Ecosystem Functioning and
Species Richness ............................................................................ 165 8.4.2 Ecology and Conservation of Wildlife Populations ................. 168
8.5 Concluding Remarks ................................................................................. 171 Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. 172 References ............................................................................................................. 172
populations. The “Living Planet Index,” a trend indicator of population abundance based on data from more than 1400 vertebrate species, documents around 30% global decline since 1970, although observed declines double the global rate in some regions of the world like the tropics (Collen et al. 2009). Other taxa have also suffered widespread declines (e.g., as documented for pollinator insects), affecting ecological processes with paramount roles in the maintenance of wild plant communities and crop production (Potts et al. 2010; Cameron et al. 2011). Scientific consensus indicates that these processes are widespread among the different biological taxa and that they affect ecosystems throughout the world; still the vast majority of species, populations, and ecosystems have never been assessed (Dobson 2005). Halting these declines is paramount for the key role of species diversity as a regulator of ecosystem processes and as an ecosystem service and a good in itself (Mace et al. 2012). Species number and population abundance determine, among other things, provisioning services such as food and genetic resources and regulating services such as disease regulation and pollination, whereas the critical importance of species diversity in delivering supporting services, such as primary production and nutrient cycling, is increasingly recognized (Chapin et al. 2000).
