Sentence examples for ecological surrogates from inspiring English sources

Forest managers use prescribed fire to reduce wildfire risk and to provide resource benefits, yet little information is available on whether prescribed fires can function as ecological surrogates for wildfire in fire-prone landscapes.

The proposal calls for introducing close extant relatives or ecological surrogates of megafauna that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene to North America to restore lost ecological and evolutionary processes, while simultaneously conserving species currently threatened with extinction on other continents [40].

Subsequently, some of these grass balds were maintained by the activities of European pastoralists, whose domestic animals acted as ecological surrogates for the extirpated native grazers.

In the present study, we have used behavioural and ecological surrogates for offspring growth and mortality (i.e., nutrition and predation), rather than direct measures such as are used widely in other studies; see for example Martin [ 14].

Testing the effectiveness of ecological classifications as surrogates for other aspects of biodiversity can improve methods for developing new surrogates, and help planners to understand their unavoidable limitations.

Our study used a rich data set as an opportunity to systematically assess the influence of four key factors, alone and in combination, in determining the apparent effectiveness of ecological classifications as surrogates.

Threatened species were important as test features both because of the need for protection and their generally restricted distributions, making them more likely than other species to be missed by conservation areas selected only with ecological classifications as surrogates.

Our test features provide insights into the effectiveness of ecological classifications as surrogates for species of conservation interest, based on data quality that is rarely available for threatened species.

Tests of ecological classifications as surrogates for target taxa that are threatened or of conservation concern might yield lower estimates of effectiveness than for more widely distributed test features, as expected intuitively and seen in empirical studies [e.g. 24], [25].

Features given quantitative conservation targets were land classes, localities of Proteaceae and selected vertebrate (freshwater fish, amphibians and reptiles) species, population sizes for medium- and large-sized mammals, and six types of spatial surrogates for ecological and evolutionary processes.

In summary, we aimed at testing predictions based on ecological theory with network surrogates.