Can habitat loss be treated independently of habitat configuration? Implications for rare and common taxa in fragmented landscapes

Application of Habitat Abundance NRS534: Ecology of Fragmented Landscapes

In this brief, I attempt to describe the recent findings that the amount of habitat is the most important factor behind population persistence and abundance. Resource managers should, therefore, focus their attention on creating reserves that are as large as possible and not be persuaded by recent discussions, as indicated by Trzcinski et al. (1999) and Villard et al. (1999), that the careful c...

Immigration Rates in Fragmented Landscapes – Empirical Evidence for the Importance of Habitat Amount for Species Persistence

BACKGROUND The total amount of native vegetation is an important property of fragmented landscapes and is known to exert a strong influence on population and metapopulation dynamics. As the relationship between habitat loss and local patch and gap characteristics is strongly non-linear, theoretical models predict that immigration rates should decrease dramatically at low levels of remaining nat...

Effects of habitat loss, habitat configuration and matrix composition on declining wetland species

The quality and isolation of habitat patches both determine where butterflies persist in fragmented landscapes.

Habitat quality and metapopulation effects are the main hypotheses that currently explain the disproportionate decline of insects in cultivated Holarctic landscapes. The former assumes a degradation in habitat quality for insects within surviving ecosystems, the latter that too few, small or isolated islands of ecosystem remain in landscapes for populations to persist. These hypotheses are ofte...

Habitat Re-Creation (Ecological Restoration) as a Strategy for Conserving Insect Communities in Highly Fragmented Landscapes

Because of their vast diversity, measured by both numbers of species as well as life history traits, insects defy comprehensive conservation planning. Thus, almost all insect conservation efforts target individual species. However, serious insect conservation requires goals that are set at the faunal level and conservation success requires strategies that conserve intact communities. This task ...