ornamental geophytes (ornamental flower bulbs) are international and national heritage considering their contribution to people's life quality around the world. iranian habitats support about 8000 species of flowering plants (belonging to 167 families and 100 genera) of which almost 1700 are endemic. iran is a rich country in terms of distribution of bulbous plants. more than 200 species of bul...

Habitat destruction, often caused by anthropogenic disturbance, can lead to the extinction of species at an unprecedented rate. It is important, therefore, to consider habitat destruction when assessing population viability. Another factor often ignored in population viability analysis, is the Allee effect that adds to the risk of populations already on the verge of extinction. Understanding th...

We developed a mean field, metapopulation model to study the consequences of habitat destruction on a predator-prey interaction. The model complements and extends earlier work published by Bascompte and Solé (1998, J. theor. Biol.195, 383-393) in that it also permits use of alternative prey (i.e., resource supplementation) by predators. The current model is stable whenever coexistence occurs, w...

The extinction process of fragmented populations, characterized by a small number of conspecifics inhabiting each patch, is heavily affected by natural and human disturbance. To evaluate the risk of extinction we consider a network of identical patches connected by passive or active dispersal and hosting a finite, discrete number of individuals. We discuss three types of disturbance affecting t...

Habitat destruction is one of the primary causes of species extinction in recent history. Even if the destruction is restricted to a local and small area, its accumulation increases the risk of extinction. To study local destruction of habitat, we present a lattice ecosystem composed of prey (X) and predator (Y). This system corresponds to a lattice version of the Lotka-Volterra model, where in...

Humankind has dramatically transformed much of the Earth’s surface and its natural ecosystems. This process is not new—it has been ongoing for millennia—but it has accelerated sharply over the last two centuries, and especially in the last several decades. Today, the loss and degradation of natural habitats can be likened to a war of attrition. Many natural ecosystems are being progressively ra...

Habitat destruction resulting from human activity is a serious threat to biodiversity. The model developed by Tilman et al. [Tilman, D., May, R.M., Lehman, C.L., Nowak, M.A., 1994. Habitat destruction and the extinction debt. Nature 371, 65-66] has become an important tool for analyzing persistence of species in habitats under destruction. However, most analysis and applications of this model h...

In an increasingly modified world, understanding and predicting the consequences of landscape alteration on biodiversity is a challenge for ecologists. To this end, metacommunity theory has developed to better understand the complexity of local and regional interactions that occur across larger landscapes. While metacommunity ecology has now provided several alternative models of species coexis...