Habitat fragmentation is a ubiquitous by-product of human activities that can alter the genetic structure of natural populations, with potentially deleterious effects on population persistence and evolutionary potential. When habitat fragmentation results in the subdivision of a population, random genetic drift then leads to the erosion of genetic diversity from within the resulting subpopulati...

Orthopterans are insects closely linked to vegetation as primary consumers as well as for other biological processes such as oviposition and development. This research aims to assess the effect of a revegetation program that began in 2007 in the compensation area linked to the construction of the Breña II dam on Orthopteran diversity within several different human-created and natural habitats (...

The high alpha-diversity of tropical forests has been amply documented, but beta-diversity-how species composition changes with distance-has seldom been studied. We present quantitative estimates of beta-diversity for tropical trees by comparing species composition of plots in lowland terra firme forest in Panama, Ecuador, and Peru. We compare observations with predictions derived from a neutra...

Ongoing expansion of large-scale agriculture critically threatens natural habitats and the pollination services they offer. Creating patches with high plant diversity within farmland is commonly suggested as a measure to benefit pollinators. However, farmers rarely adopt such practice, instead removing naturally occurring plants (weeds). By combining pollinator exclusion experiments with analys...

We studied the impact of forest edges on the fruit-feeding butterfly communities of three forest remnants in Ghana, West Africa. Community diversity was assessed using traps baited with fermenting banana. Two 200-m, edge-to-interior transects of five traps each were established in each forest. Sampling spanned 1 yr for a total of 180-210 trap days per site and resulted in 2,634 specimens and 56...

Declines in pollinator abundance and diversity are not only a conservation issue, but also a threat to crop pollination. Maintained infrastructure corridors, such as those containing electricity transmission lines, are potentially important wild pollinator habitat. However, there is a lack of evidence comparing the abundance and diversity of wild pollinators in transmission corridors with other...

We evaluated whether ecosystem engineers can accomplish two conservation goals simultaneously: (1) indirectly maintain populations of an endangered animal through habitat modifi cation and (2) increase riparian plant diversity. We tested for eff ects of a prominent ecosystem engineer, the beaver Castor canadensis, on populations of St. Francis’ satyr butterfl y Neonympha mitchellii francisci an...

Since the mid 1990s, ecologists have intensified their efforts to describe and quantify the effects that biodiversity can exert on the various processes within ecosystems. Both theoretical and experimental work has shown that within a habitat, changing diversity has profound effects on biomass production, nutrient retention, and other ecosystem characteristics such as stability. In most experim...

Habitat fragmentation is widespread across ecosystems, detrimentally affecting biodiversity. Although most habitat fragmentation studies have been conducted on macroscopic organisms, microbial communities and fungal processes may also be threatened by fragmentation. This study investigated whether fragmentation, and the effects of fragmentation on plants, altered fungal diversity and function w...

Mitigation to offset the impacts of land development is becoming increasingly common, with reintroductions and created habitat programs used as key actions. However, numerous reviews cite high rates of poor success from these programs, and a need for improved monitoring and scientific testing to evaluate outcomes and improve management actions. We conducted extensive monitoring of a released po...