Research Exercise 1: Effects of habitat area and isolation on fragmented animals populations

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Habitat destruction has forced many species that were once neighbors in their natural habitats to move into much smaller and unfamiliar territory. Habitat loss and fragmentation are two major threats to biodiversity around the world. The structure for the conservation of fragmented populations is established on the principles of Island biography. This idea of Island biography is focused on a species composition and richness on an Island habitat and aims at understanding and explaining the factors effecting the species diversity. Despite several decades of conducted research, researchers have not yet proven that patch areas can predict a species occupancy in fragmented areas do to lack of quantitative synthesis. In this scholarly article, data from 1,015 bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian, and invertebrate population networks was collected on 6 continents. The surprising results showed that patch area and isolation are poor predictors of occupancy for most of the listed species. Researchers examined improper scaling and biases in the species delineation and seek to find proof that the type of land cover that separates patches mostly effects the sensitivity of species to patch area and isolation.  The results of the research indicated that the patch area and isolation are important factors that effect the occupancy of several species.

 

Researchers maximized the size, accuracy, and standardization of their datasets by directly collecting raw data from authors and conducting their own statistical analyses. Studies were also found by a complete search using the Web of Science (March 2005) using the following terms:  “patch occupancy,” “habitat occupancy,” “metapopulation,” “island biogeography,” and “incidence function.” Several hundred articles were screened of which 280 were examined in detail and 109 of the 280 were deemed ok to be included in the research.

I found this research project really interesting. Habitat destruct has always been a topic of interest to me and this article went into much more detail. I found it specially interesting to learn of the importance of patch area and isolation. I believe the results of this research are important and should be utilized to predict and in the end protect more species in danger do to fragmentaiton.

Authors

  1. Laura R. Prugh
    • aDepartment of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, 137 Mulford Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720;
  2. Karen E. Hodges
    • bCentre for Species at Risk and Habitat Studies, University of British Columbia Okanagan, 3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, Canada V1V 1V7; and 
  3. Anthony R. E. Sinclair
    • cCentre for Biodiversity Research, University of British Columbia, 6270 University Boulevard, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4
  4. Justin S. Brashares
    • aDepartment of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, 137 Mulford Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720;

Link to full scholarly

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/52/20770.full