Tropical lowland rain forest (TLRF) biodiversity is under threat from anthropogenic factors including deforestation which creates forest fragments of different sizes that can further undergo various internal patterns of logging. Such interventions can modify previous equilibrium abundance and spatial distribution patterns of offspring recruitment and/or pollen dispersal. Little is known about h...

Forest fragmentation results in a loss of forest interior and an increase in edge habitat. We studied how understorey bird community composition and habitat variables changed along an edge-to-interior gradient in a 1248-ha lowland rainforest patch in peninsular Malaysia. Birds and environmental variables such as vegetation structure and litter depth were detected within a 25-m radius of each of...

Mutualistic interactions repeatedly preserved across fragmented landscapes can scale-up to form a spatial metanetwork describing the distribution of interactions across patches. We explored the structure of a bird seed-dispersal (BSD) metanetwork in 16 Neotropical forest fragments to test whether a distinct subset of BSD-interactions may mediate landscape functional connectivity. The metanetwor...

In the tropics, habitat fragmentation alters forest-climate interactions in diverse ways. On a local scale (less than 1 km), elevated desiccation and wind disturbance near fragment margins lead to sharply increased tree mortality, thus altering canopy-gap dynamics, plant community composition, biomass dynamics and carbon storage. Fragmented forests are also highly vulnerable to edge-related fir...

Forest fragmentation is a primary threat to terrestrial biodiversity. We combine a parcel-level econometric model of land-use transitions with spatially-explicit landscape simulations to predict the empirical distribution of fragmentation outcomes under given market conditions and policy scenarios. Our model explains transitions between forest, agricultural, and urban uses, allowing us to model...

BACKGROUND Understanding changes in the host-parasite relationship due to habitat fragmentation is necessary for better management and conservation of endangered species in fragmented landscapes. Pathogens and parasites can pose severe threat to species in restricted environments such as forest fragments where there is increased contact of wildlife with human and livestock populations. Environm...

Deforestation and resulting landscape fragmentation are important concerns in many tropical areas. Deforestation is a complex process with many potential feedback loops, many of which are ignored in models that attempt to interpolate forest loss based on past deforestation rates. In addition, most ecological studies of the impacts of deforestation have focused on landscapes that are already fra...

Following habitat fragmentation individual habitat patches may lose species over time as they pay off their "extinction debt." Species with relatively low rates of population extinction and colonization ("slow" species) may maintain extinction debts for particularly prolonged periods, but few data are available to test this prediction. We analyzed two unusually detailed data sets on forest plan...

Fuelling, Rachel R. M.S., Purdue University, May 2014. Diversity and Distribution of Plant Communities Related to Forest Fragment Size, Shape, Age, and Structure. Major Professor: Jordan M. Marshall. In the Midwest region of the United States, forested areas have been removed to make way for agriculture and development. In the southern Midwestern states, including Indiana, cultivated and pastur...