Selection of priority areas for arthropod conservation in the Azores archipelago

Abstract

Copyright © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.The largest standardised database available to date for arthropods in native forests of the Azores archipelago was used to determine the minimum optimal set of native forest fragments needed to accomplish four different targets of species occurrence (presence-absence) and abundance (20, 50 and 80%) using different groups of arthropods and all data combined. The results showed that occurrence and 20% abundance targets gave similar optimal solutions for most of the groups considered. At least one fragment on each of the seven studied islands was required to accomplish any occurrence and abundance target. To achieve 80% of abundance for all species, all fragments were necessary and to guarantee 50% of the overall abundance of endemics, 17 out of 18 native forests were needed. A suggestion is made to apply a measure of biotic integrity related to disturbance to select, among alternative optimal solutions, the set of areas that will help to guarantee the viability of populations. Some guidelines for the selection of priority areas for conservation in the Azores are presented