Most animals live in seasonal environments and experience very different conditions throughout the year. Behavioral strategies like migration, hibernation, and a life cycle adapted to the local seasonality help to cope with fluctuations in environmental conditions. Thus, how an individual utilizes the environment depends both on the current availability of habitat and the behavioral prerequisit...

Despite the importance of habitat in determining species distribution and persistence, habitat dynamics are rarely modeled in studies of metapopulations. We used an integrated habitat-occupancy model to simultaneously quantify habitat change, site fidelity, and local colonization and extinction rates for larvae of a suite of Great Plains stream fishes in the Arikaree River, eastern Colorado, US...

Citation: Giannoulaki M, Pyrounaki MM, Bourdeix J-H, Ben Abdallah L, Bonanno A, Basilone G, Iglesias M, Ventero A, De Felice A, Leonori I, Valavanis VD, Machias A and Saraux C (2017) Habitat Suitability Modeling to Identify the Potential Nursery Grounds of the Atlantic Mackerel and Its Relation to Oceanographic Conditions in the Mediterranean Sea. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:230. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017...

Hawaii has no native pines, but many species have been introduced as ornamental or potential timber trees. These species have been planted in environments that differ greatly from their natural habitat. This paper describes how the coordinated seasonal cycle of growth and flowering has been influenced by the climatic conditions these pines have encountered in Hawaii. Hawaii has no native pines,...

We quantified the use of habitat patches by brown trout, Salmo trutta, during summer conditions in a plains stream in the western United States. A Global Positioning System was used to map discrete habitat patches (2–420 m) consisting of macrophytes, wood accumulation, or deep water. Habitat use by brown trout was monitored by radio telemetry. Brown trout used habitat in a nonrandom manner with...

Habitat segregation among competing species is widespread yet very little is know how this is achieved in practice. In a case study, we examined short-term effects of conspecific and congeneric density on habitat selection in two competing marine isopod species, Idotea emarginata and Idotea baltica. Under semi-natural conditions in large outdoor cylindrical tanks (4 m high; volume 5.5 m), anima...

The concept of "ecological traps" was introduced over three decades ago. An ecological trap occurs when, by various mechanisms, low-quality (yielding low fitness) habitat is more attractive than good habitat, thus coaxing individuals to settle there despite a resultant loss of fitness. Empirical work on such traps has increased dramatically in the past decade, but the converse-avoidance of high...

The purpose of this study is to quantify the importance of turbulent kinetic energy, strain, water velocity, fish depth, and fish distance to wood to the decision making process of overwintering coho salmon during habitat selection. Although many studies have evaluated this habitat selection of salmon, few have included hydraulic variables in the equation, while recent research indicates that t...

Anthropogenic habitat loss and fragmentation have been implicated as among the key drivers of the burgeoning global biodiversity crisis. In response, there is a growing mandate among natural resource managers to evaluate the impacts of proposed management actions on the extent and fragmentation of habitats. Unfortunately, few guidelines exist to help managers understand the many complex issues ...

There is a growing recognition for the significance of evolutionary thinking in ecology and conservation biology. However, ecology and conservation studies often work with species-specific, fixed traits that ignore intraspecific variation. The way the habitat of a species is considered is an example of typological thinking biased by human perception. Structural habitat units (e.g., land cover t...