NRS 534: Ecology of Fragmental Landscapes Yuyu Zhou Spring 2005 Overview Connectivity refers to the degree to which a landscape facilitates or impedes ecological flows such as the movement of organisms among habitat patches and therefore the rate of movement among local populations in a metapopulation (McGarigal et al. v3). Although connectivity is important in landscape ecology, there is no pr...

      The present study was performed to explore the matrix property of Ficus glomerata fruit mucilage for making transdermal patches. The mucilage was evaluated for its physicochemical properties. Various transdermal patches of indomethacin were prepared by solvent evaporation technique using different proportions of F. glomerata fruit mucilage. The compatib...

1. One of the oldest questions in ecology is how species diversity in any given trophic level is related to the availability of essential resources that limit biomass (e.g. water, nutrients, light or prey). Researchers have tried to understand this relationship by focusing either on how diversity is influenced by the availability of resources, or alternatively, how resource abundance is influen...

Ecologists are familiar with two data structures commonly used to represent landscapes. Vector-based maps delineate land cover types as polygons, while raster lattices represent the landscape as a grid. Here we adopt a third lattice data structure, the graph. A graph represents a landscape as a set of nodes (e.g., habitat patches) connected to some degree by edges that join pairs of nodes funct...

Ecological theory predicts that demographic connectivity structures the dynamics of local populations within metapopulation systems, but empirical support has been constrained by major limitations in data and methodology. We tested this prediction for giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, a key habitat-forming species in temperate coastal ecosystems worldwide, in southern California, USA. We combine...

Making links between ecological processes and the scales at which they operate is an enduring challenge of community ecology. Our understanding of ecological communities cannot advance if we do not distinguish larger scale processes from smaller ones. Variability at small spatial scales can be important because it carries information about biological interactions, which cannot be explained by e...

To facilitate forest planning and management on National Wildlife Refuges, we synthesized multiple data sources to describe land ownership patterns, land cover, landscape pattern, and changes in forest composition for four ecoregions and their associated refuges of the Upper Midwest. We related observed patterns to ecological processes important for forest conservation and restoration, with spe...

Many threatened species worldwide rely on patches of remnant vegetation in private landholdings. To establish private reserves that contribute effectively to conservation involves a wide range of complex and interacting ecological, legal, social, and financial factors. These can be seen as a series of successive hurdles, each with multiple bars, which must all be surmounted. The golden lion tam...

Optimizing land-use allocation is important to regional sustainable development, as it promotes the social equality of public services, increases the economic benefits of land-use activities, and reduces the ecological risk of land-use planning. Most land-use optimization models allocate land-use using cell-level operations that fragment land-use patches. These models do not cooperate well with...

Although competition-dispersal tradeoffs are commonly invoked to explain species coexistence for animals and plants in spatially structured environments, such mechanisms for coexistence remain unknown for microorganisms. Here we show that two recently speciated marine bacterioplankton populations pursue different behavioral strategies to exploit nutrient particles in adaptation to the landscape...