The future of suitable habitats of an endangered Neotropical grassland bird: A path to extinction?

Abstract

Global changes increasingly worry researchers and policymakers and may have irreversible impacts on Earth's biodiversity. Similar to other phytophysiognomies, natural grasslands suffer from the effects of land use changes and rising temperatures, threatening animal and plant communities. Birds, being very sensitive to these changes, are widely studied and fundamental to understand the dynamics of ecosystems in relation to climate and land use changes. The Campo Miner Geositta poeciloptera is a grassland bird endemic to the Brazilian Cerrado and threatened with extinction that has been widely studied in recent years. We analyze the decrease in its extent of occurrence (EOO) and the effects of climate and land use change to understand the environmental suitability of the species in current and future scenarios. We used 5 common algorithms to produce ecological niche models. For future predictions, we use two general circulation models for two different greenhouse gas emission scenarios with different climate policies, an optimistic (ssp245) and a pessimistic (ssp585), plus two land use models focusing on increasing farmlands and reducing native grasslands. The current EOO represents ~45% of that presented by the IUCN EOO. The models generated for the present were satisfactory (TSS = 0.77 and ROC = 0.90) and showed high environmental suitability in areas where the species is currently found and low suitability where it is already extinct. All future scenarios have reduced suitable areas for the species, and the models of a greater increase in temperature and increase in farmlands and a greater decrease in grasslands were the worse. Our results reinforce the need to care about biome awareness disparity and the importance of actively preserving grassy-shrub areas. Apparently, the state of Minas Gerais will be the only stronghold of the species in the coming years; however, the lack of protected areas that guarantee its survival needs attention.