The energy and nutrient content of most agricultural crops are as good as or superior to natural foods for wild geese and they tend to be available in agricultural landscapes in far greater abundance. Artificial grasslands (fertilised native swards and intensively managed reseeds) offer far superior quality forage and higher intake rates than seminatural or natural grasslands. The availability ...

Increasingly more research has focused on characterizing diversity within forest pathogen populations using molecular markers but few studies have characterized features of the landscape that help create or maintain this diversity. Forest diseases commonly occur in patchy distributions across natural landscapes which can be re¯ected in the genetic composition of the fragmented pathogen populati...

We discuss fitness landscapes and how they can be modified to account for co-evolution. We are interested in using the landscape as a way to model rational decision making in a toy economic system. We develop a model very similar to the Tangled Nature Model of Christensen et. al. that we call the Tangled Decision Model. This is a natural setting for our discussion of co-evolutionary fitness lan...

For several decades, many grassland bird species have been declining in abundance throughout the Midwest and Great Plains regions of the United States, possibly due to loss of natural grassland habitat and increasing urbanization. I used 20 years of data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey to identify increasing, decreasing, and stable populations of 36 grassland-nesting bird species. ...

Genotypic fitness landscapes are constructed by assessing the fitness of all possible combinations of a given number of mutations. In the last years, several experimental fitness landscapes have been completely resolved. As fitness landscapes are high-dimensional, their characterization relies on simple measures of their structure, which can be used as statistics in empirical applications. Here...

Neutrality arises from the many to one mapping between genotypes and phenotypes. Several studies have demonstrated that in the presence of selective neutrality evolution is qualitatively different from that on the more common rugged fitness landscapes which are often (implicitly) assumed by artificial evolution practitioners. Almost all of such work has been based on discrete genotype fitness l...

Urbanization and agricultural intensification of landscapes are important drivers of global change, which in turn have direct impacts on local ecological communities leading to shifts in species distributions and interactions. Here, we illustrate how human-altered landscapes, with novel ornamental and crop plant communities, result not only in changes to local community diversity of floral-depe...

Cities present significant opportunities for new landscape perspectives that can help inform conservation and development decisions. Early in the twenty-first century, the majority of the planet’s population became urban as more people lived in city-regions for the first time in our history. As the global population increases, so does this urbanization. The environmental challenges of populatio...

Large carnivores are frequently presented as saviours of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning through their creation of trophic cascades, an idea largely based on studies coming primarily out of relatively natural landscapes. However, in large parts of the world, particularly in Europe, large carnivores live in and are returning to strongly human-modified ecosystems. At present, we lack a coh...