Sheremetyev I.S.
В издании Invasion of alien species in Holarctic: programme & book of abstracts of the IV International Symposium
Год: 2013 Страницы: 159
Commonly, bioinvasion seems to be bad. However, the invaders become of much wider scientific in- terest than the control of invasions do. If the community structure is a display of the long-term invasions and extinctions, then to define species in an invader-native continuum and to study their distribution are a neccessary way to understand how the communities are structured and what their future is. The diversity of Far East ungulates is incomparably higher than one in other Russian region: 10 from 19 species of the country besides the cattle. How do their past distribution changes explain their contem- porary community structure? What are the species that may be identified as invaders and how can their invasions influence the natives? The ungulate distribution changes in the Far East may be shown using the Pleistocene and Holocene fossils of the large herbivores in Russia, China, Korea, and Japan. The few initially widely distributed species from the genera Mammuthus, Coelodonta, Bison, and Equus existed here in the Pleistocene, but become extinct or absent in the Holocene. The same happened to the musk ox Ovibos moschatus rewilded recently. Other widely distributed species lost mainly south part of their ranges. Among them, the range of reindeer Rangifer tarandus and snow sheep Ovis nivicola had the considerable reduction. Its Pleisto- cene fossils were recorded much further south than now. The range of moose Alces alces decreased less- er, and the range reduction of red deer Cervus elaphus in the 1900s was least. The whole shift in the range of roe deer Capreolus pygargus and wild boar Sus scrofa now is insignificant, although their ranges changed formerly. It is difficult to define exactly when the seven appeared in the Far East, but in the Pleistocene-Holocene transition they were widely distributed in Eurasia at least. In the Far East, they are native constituents in the large-herbivore community. It is a rest of the mammoth fauna. The earliest fos- sils of other three are only in the south Asia. Their ranges expanded later. However the fate of the invad- ers here was not similar. In the Pleistocene, the low-plastic goral Nemorhaedus caudatus and musk deer Moschus moschiferus considerably expanded their ranges northwardly. However, their today ranges in the Far East is fragmented nearly without a human impact. The range of the high-plastic sika deer Cervus nippon continues to expand in Russia. The specialism of the goral and musk deer will hardly facilitate their considerable influence on natives, which hardly use the same habitats. The sika deer plasticity seems to be main cause of its dominance in the local communities in the south Far East. Thus the plasticity is the essential feature of the successive invader. The presented data show that the invaders enlarge the local and metacommunity diversity rather than disturb them.
