Identifying and Managing Threatened Invertebrates through Assessment of Coextinction Risk

Abstract

Invertebrates with specific host species may have a high probability of extinction when their hosts have a high probability of extinction. Some of these invertebrates are more likely to go extinct than their hosts, and under some circumstances, specific actions to conserve the host may be detrimental to the invertebrate. A critical constraint to identifying such invertebrates is uncertainty about their level of host specificity. We used two host-breadth models that explicitly incorporated uncertainty in the host specificity of an invertebrate species. We devised a decision protocol to identify actions that may increase the probability of persistence of a given dependent species. The protocol..