Assessing the relationship between species traits and extinction risk at a regional level: an analysis involving Brazilian terrestrial mammals.

Matheus C Drago,Davor Vrcibradic,Letícia M Raposo

doi:10.1590/0001-3765202120210761

Abstract

One of the various concerns of conservation biology is determining why certain species are more threatened than others. In this study, we aim to relate the national conservation status of Brazilian mammals with the taxonomic group to which they belong and with three of their intrinsic traits: body mass, diet, and litter size. We compiled a database containing the species, their status, and their attributes, and a multiple correspondence analysis was applied to identify relationships between traits and status. The two groups that presented the highest relative frequencies of threatened species were "ungulates" and Carnivora. Additionally, mammals with body mass of 10 kg or more and with carnivorous diet had a higher relative frequency of threatened taxa. We found not only a strong relationship between intrinsic traits and conservation status, but also among the traits themselves, which highlights the role of the "group" variable as one of the best predictors of the risk that a given species be threatened. We believe our study has a broad potential for the conservation of species at the regional level, especially regarding the species currently classified as Data Deficient, and for identifying which species are prone to becoming threatened.

Highlights

Conservation biology is concerned with understanding the effects of human activities on other organisms, communities, and ecosystems, or with providing principles and tools for preserving biological diversity (Soulé 1985), and with explaining why certain species present a higher risk of becoming threatened than others
Our analyses indicated that some intrinsic traits of Brazilian terrestrial mammal species are correlated with their degree of threat, concurring with several other studies that have attempted to relate biological and ecological traits of species with their proneness to being imperiled
Purvis et al (2000), for example, showed that high trophic level, low population density, slow life-history and small geographic range are associated with high extinction risks in Primates and Carnivora

Summary

Introduction

Conservation biology is concerned with understanding the effects of human activities on other organisms, communities, and ecosystems, or with providing principles and tools for preserving biological diversity (Soulé 1985), and with explaining why certain species present a higher risk of becoming threatened than others. In order to predict extinction risk, it is important to understand how multiple ecological factors interact with each other (Davidson et al, 2009) and which biological and ecological traits make a species more vulnerable (Chichorro et al 2019). In this way, several studies provide evidence of a non-random pattern of species loss, both across ecological and geological time scales Species with certain life-history and ecological traits could be under a higher risk of becoming threatened (Davidson et al 2009, 2012)

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