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Status & goals for summer
Up to Progress report post-NCEAS
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I am currently working on a detailed verbal summary describing our methods and overall results so far (basically a longer version of the abstract) just to clarify what we did (& why) -- this will serve also as a good starting point to structure the full manuscript. But until then, I will post the analysis results (and figures we made from our talk) on the site for you to peruse at your leisure.
I will start by mentioning the analyses we'd still like to do and then follow up with what we will need to do these analyses (more data!), including tasks for everyone!
One addition we hope to make to our analyses is to include some functional attributes to the species in our lists, so as to be able to say more about the functional similarlity between linear and natural habitats. This will provide our only means of looking at potential services. We had discussed doing this early on in the semester, but we obviously ran out of time at the end. Luckily, at the meeting, we discovered that the Mechanisms group and the Functional Diversity group have functional classifications for a number of plant and animal groups that we should be able to use for the Central American data. We can certainly get information about birds. We want to keep it fairly simple, so we thought we would classifiy each species by feeding strategy and size class (found to be important for arthropod reductions by the Mechanism group). We should be able to easily look up this information for the bird species in the midwest and in eastern NA. I will post our data in species-list format to make this easier for the analysis. We do also have 'disturbance tolerance' information for the midwestern data that we can use -- not sure if we can get this data for the Nicaraguan butterflies, but we can see.
Since we have the data to look at some management strategies specifically in the midwest and in eastern NA, it would be great if we could find a way to do the same for the Central American data. Unfortunately, the places where we have data from LH with different attributes (e.g., connected, not connected, simple, complex, etc), we do not have natural habitat data. One option is to use the natural habitat data from Rivas (Nicaragua) to compare to the LH data from Matiguas (Nicaragua) for birds. I do understand that they are not strictly comparable climates, but perhaps since we'd be looking at relative similarity, it wouldn't matter so much as long as there was some overlap in the species lists. Sergio & Adina -- what do you think? Also, if we could find some data on natural habitats (bird and plant data) in Costa Rica, we could also look at comparing different types of LH. So much work has been done in Costa Rica, I imagine there must be data out there that we could use!
Jonathon also had a good idea about comparing the plant communities between the sites in Matiguas and Rivas (Jonathon, please feel free to clarify, as my notes are a bit sketchy on this) since one is significantly wetter than the other. The idea is to see if the similarity between natural areas and LH in the wetter site is more pronounced that in the drier site due to microclimatic effects of the linearity -- i.e., maybe in areas where the plant species are more adapted to the moist/humid conditions, the extreme conditions of a linear habitat becomes a stronger filter (= lower survivorship for plants adapted to wetter conditions). To do this, I need to re-do some of the calculations, as we had shrub data for Matiguas, but not for Rivas. I will remove the shrub data and then re-calculate the similarity indices.
So what do we need to do all of this?
1) Functional data for birds (feeding strategy, size -- what we can get from the other theme groups) for all sites. I (Kim) will get in touch with Fabrice & Stacy about getting their raw data and then someone will need to sort through it and fill in the information on our spreadsheets. Jonathon/Danny/Jenny can look up information on North American birds using the http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/ or http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/.
2) Natural habitat data from Costa Rica (birds &/or plants) to compare with LH data. (Sergio & Adina?)
3) Natural habitat data on birds from Quebec (Jonathon)
4) Natural habitat data from midwest (in more detail than what we have now) for birds and plants (species) (Danny; Jenny?)
I think we can get all of this *fairly* easily. At least, I think these are things to shoot for. If we can't get more, I think we can still publish based on what we have now. Some things are just a matter of data interpretation or re-analysis. Please let me know what you feel you have the time to work on over the next few months. We all have other demands on our time, but I hope we can make some progress on the manuscript before the fall.
QUESTION FOR ADINA & SERGIO: In the data you have gathered, there is often a classification of 'Riparian Forests'. Would you consider these to be linear features? I.e., do they refer to linear strips of vegetation along waterways or are they more like blocks of forest in an area surrounding a river?
That is all for now. Please feel free to respond with comments and/or clarifications. I'll post this and more "final" data files to the site ASAP.
Best,
Kim
I will start by mentioning the analyses we'd still like to do and then follow up with what we will need to do these analyses (more data!), including tasks for everyone!
One addition we hope to make to our analyses is to include some functional attributes to the species in our lists, so as to be able to say more about the functional similarlity between linear and natural habitats. This will provide our only means of looking at potential services. We had discussed doing this early on in the semester, but we obviously ran out of time at the end. Luckily, at the meeting, we discovered that the Mechanisms group and the Functional Diversity group have functional classifications for a number of plant and animal groups that we should be able to use for the Central American data. We can certainly get information about birds. We want to keep it fairly simple, so we thought we would classifiy each species by feeding strategy and size class (found to be important for arthropod reductions by the Mechanism group). We should be able to easily look up this information for the bird species in the midwest and in eastern NA. I will post our data in species-list format to make this easier for the analysis. We do also have 'disturbance tolerance' information for the midwestern data that we can use -- not sure if we can get this data for the Nicaraguan butterflies, but we can see.
Since we have the data to look at some management strategies specifically in the midwest and in eastern NA, it would be great if we could find a way to do the same for the Central American data. Unfortunately, the places where we have data from LH with different attributes (e.g., connected, not connected, simple, complex, etc), we do not have natural habitat data. One option is to use the natural habitat data from Rivas (Nicaragua) to compare to the LH data from Matiguas (Nicaragua) for birds. I do understand that they are not strictly comparable climates, but perhaps since we'd be looking at relative similarity, it wouldn't matter so much as long as there was some overlap in the species lists. Sergio & Adina -- what do you think? Also, if we could find some data on natural habitats (bird and plant data) in Costa Rica, we could also look at comparing different types of LH. So much work has been done in Costa Rica, I imagine there must be data out there that we could use!
Jonathon also had a good idea about comparing the plant communities between the sites in Matiguas and Rivas (Jonathon, please feel free to clarify, as my notes are a bit sketchy on this) since one is significantly wetter than the other. The idea is to see if the similarity between natural areas and LH in the wetter site is more pronounced that in the drier site due to microclimatic effects of the linearity -- i.e., maybe in areas where the plant species are more adapted to the moist/humid conditions, the extreme conditions of a linear habitat becomes a stronger filter (= lower survivorship for plants adapted to wetter conditions). To do this, I need to re-do some of the calculations, as we had shrub data for Matiguas, but not for Rivas. I will remove the shrub data and then re-calculate the similarity indices.
So what do we need to do all of this?
1) Functional data for birds (feeding strategy, size -- what we can get from the other theme groups) for all sites. I (Kim) will get in touch with Fabrice & Stacy about getting their raw data and then someone will need to sort through it and fill in the information on our spreadsheets. Jonathon/Danny/Jenny can look up information on North American birds using the http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/ or http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/.
2) Natural habitat data from Costa Rica (birds &/or plants) to compare with LH data. (Sergio & Adina?)
3) Natural habitat data on birds from Quebec (Jonathon)
4) Natural habitat data from midwest (in more detail than what we have now) for birds and plants (species) (Danny; Jenny?)
I think we can get all of this *fairly* easily. At least, I think these are things to shoot for. If we can't get more, I think we can still publish based on what we have now. Some things are just a matter of data interpretation or re-analysis. Please let me know what you feel you have the time to work on over the next few months. We all have other demands on our time, but I hope we can make some progress on the manuscript before the fall.
QUESTION FOR ADINA & SERGIO: In the data you have gathered, there is often a classification of 'Riparian Forests'. Would you consider these to be linear features? I.e., do they refer to linear strips of vegetation along waterways or are they more like blocks of forest in an area surrounding a river?
That is all for now. Please feel free to respond with comments and/or clarifications. I'll post this and more "final" data files to the site ASAP.
Best,
Kim