Between a rock and a hard place:
What can turning rocks tell us about land-use change impacts on animals living in a rock outcrop?
Let's look under some boulders in a biodiversity hotspot in western India to discover the impact of habitat change on threatened animals.
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The tropics are undergoing large-scale land-use change, especially for the purpose of meeting agricultural requirements. Understanding how this impacts biodiversity is important, especially in under-appreciated open ecosystems such as rock outcrops, home for many threatened species. We will evaluate how the movement of large rocks from the natural rock outcrop for rice paddy cultivation and subsequent abandonment, and orchard plantations are affecting rock-dwelling fauna. This case study demonstrates that agricultural land-use changes can affect the microhabitat availability (large rocks in this case), and change the animal occurrence. The study also shows that, depending on the type of land-use change, one particular endemic animal may benefit from the change, while others are negatively impacted, highlighting the context-specificity in species responses. This is one of the first studies to determine the impacts of agricultural conversion of rock outcrops, thereby emphasizing the conservation value of habitats that are often classified as wastelands. Let's explore under the rocks!
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