A challenge for conservation management is to understand how population and habitat dynamics interact to affect species persistence. In real landscapes, timing and duration of disturbances can vary, and species' responses to habitat changes will depend on how timing of dispersal and reproduction events relate to the landscape temporal structure. For instance, increasing disturbance frequency ma...

Habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss have taxed early-successional species including the Northern Bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) and numerous grassland obligate birds. Translocation is often applied to counteract the consequences of habitat fragmentation through the creation, reestablishment, or augmentation of wild populations for the purposes of conservation, biodiversity maintenance....

Abstract Habitat fragmentation impacts ecosystems worldwide through habitat loss, reduced connectivity, and edge effects. Yet, these landscape factors are often confounded, leaving much to be investigated about their relative effects, especially on species interactions. In a experiment, we the consequences of connectivity effects for seed dispersal by ants. We found that ants dispersed seeds fa...

Animal habitat selection is a process that functions at multiple, hierarchically. structured spatial scales. Thus multi-scale analyses should be the basis for inferences about factors driving the habitat selection process. Vertebrate herbivores forage selectively on the basis of phytochemistry, but few studies have investigated the influence of selective foraging (i.e., fine-scale habitat selec...

Monitoring and reporting on the status of Natura 2000 habitats is an obligation under the 1992 Habitats Directive for each member state of the European Union (EU). Satellite imagery providing up-to-date information for a large areal coverage could be an interesting source to complement conventional, but laborious, field-driven surveying methods. Quality of habitats can be assessed through their...

Recovery of endangered species in highly fragmented habitats often requires habitat restoration. Selection of restoration sites typically involves too many options and too much uncertainty to reach a decision based on existing reserve design methods. The Fender’s blue butterfly ( Icaricia icarioides fenderi) survives in small, isolated patches of remnant prairie in Oregon’s Willamette Valley—a ...

Animal responses to habitat boundaries will influence the effects of habitat fragmentation on population dynamics. Although this is an intuitive and often observed animal behavior, the influences of habitat boundaries have rarely been quantified in the field or considered in theoretical models of large scale processes. We quantified movement behavior of the Fender’s blue butterfly (Icaricia ica...

Conservation of species that are patchily distributed must consider processes that influence both the occurrence of individuals within patches, and the persistence of populations across multiple habitat patches within the landscape. Here we present a rare regional assessment of the population size and distribution of a patchily distributed, threatened species, the purple-crowned fairy-wren (Mal...

Although human-driven landscape modification is generally characterized by habitat destruction and fragmentation, it may also result in the creation of new habitat patches, providing conditions conducive to spontaneous colonization. In this article, we propose the concept of "colonization credit" (i.e., the number of species yet to colonize a patch, following landscape changes) as a framework t...

Habitat fragmentation is one of the largest threats to biodiversity. Landscape corridors, which are hypothesized to reduce the negative consequences of fragmentation, have become common features of ecological management plans worldwide. Despite their popularity, there is little evidence documenting the effectiveness of corridors in preserving biodiversity at large scales. Using a large-scale re...