This study assesses the effects of considering within-site habitat configuration when designing reserve networks. This attribute takes all its importance in situations where the long-term integrity of (within-site) habitat patches cannot be preserved without protecting their surrounding environment. We addressed this issue through the concrete problem of selecting a reserve network of natural p...

1. This paper describes a novel approach to modelling of metapopulation dynamics. The model is constructed as a generalized incidence function, which describes how the fraction of occupied habitat patches depends on patch areas and isolations. 2. The model may be fitted to presence/absence data from a metapopulation at a dynamic equilibrium between extinctions and colonizations. 3. Using the es...

Although large-bodied tropical forest birds are impacted by both habitat loss and fragmentation, their patterns of habitat occupancy will also depend on the degree of forest habitat disturbance, which may interact synergistically or additively with fragmentation effects. Here, we examine the effects of forest patch and landscape metrics, and levels of forest disturbance on the patterns of persi...

We have constructed a linear array of coupled, microscale patches of habitat. When bacteria are inoculated into this habitat landscape, a metapopulation emerges. Local bacterial populations in each patch coexist and weakly couple with neighbor populations in nearby patches. These spatially distributed bacterial populations interact through local extinction and colonization processes. We have fu...

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 ...

Urbanization can result in the fragmentation of once contiguous natural landscapes into a patchy habitat interspersed within a growing urban matrix. Animals living in fragmented landscapes often have reduced movement among habitat patches because of avoidance of intervening human development, which potentially leads to both reduced gene flow and pathogen transmission between patches. Mammalian ...

Prey availability and predation risk are important determinants of habitat use, but their importance may vary across spatial scales. In many marine systems, predator and prey distributions covary at large spatial scales, but do no coincide at small spatial scales. We investigated the influences of prey abundance and tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier ) predation risk on Indian Ocean bottlenose dolp...

In an experiment in a southern Australian estuary, patches of seagrass canopy were removed to test the importance of the canopy to fish in areas where all other factors were known to be consistent with seagrass presence. The total number of fish was slightly lower in patches cleared of seagrass than in patches of undisturbed seagrass, but was not as low as in unvegetated patches. The benthic ha...

In environments where food resources are spatially variable and temporarily impoverished, consumers that encounter habitat patches with different food density should focus their foraging initially where food density is highest before they move to patches where food density is lower. Increasing missed opportunity costs should drive individuals progressively to patches with lower food density as ...