It has come to be almost an article of faith amongst population biologists and GA researchers alike that the principal feature of a fitness landscape as regards evolutionary dynamics is “ruggedness”, particularly as measured by the auto-correlation function. In this paper we demonstrate that auto-correlation alone may be inadequate as a mediator of evolutionary dynamics, specifically in the pre...

While species extinctions continue to be a matter of extreme concern, changes in biodiversity in the world’s agricultural landscapes have largely escaped attention. Implicitly, the world community has traded off biodiversity in these landscapes against the conservation of threatened endemics in protected areas. But biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes also has an opportunity cost. It af...

Assuming better colonization abilities of inferior competitors, the competition-colonization trade-off (CCTO) is one of the hypotheses that explains spatial variation of species composition in fragmented habitats. Whereas this mechanism may structure some plant and insect communities, ecologists have failed to document its operation in other natural systems, and its generality has been question...

Anthropogenic changes in land use threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functioning by the conversion of natural habitat into agricultural mosaic landscapes, often with drastic consequences for the associated fauna. The first step in the development of efficient conservation plans is to understand movement of animals through complex habitat mosaics. Therefore, we studied ranging behavior and habi...

An important barrier to enduring behavioural change is the human tendency to discount the future. Drawing on evolutionary theories of life history and biophilia, this study investigates whether exposure to natural versus urban landscapes affects people's temporal discount rates. The results of three studies, two laboratory experiments and a field study reveal that individual discount rates are ...

Given the potential for rapid and microgeographical adaptation, ecologists increasingly are exploring evolutionary explanations for community patterns. Biotic selection can generate local adaptations that alter species interactions. Although some gene flow might be necessary to fuel local adaptation, higher gene flow can homogenise traits across regions and generate local maladaptation. Herein,...

In the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, glaciers taught us a great lesson about the earth. In the 1820s and 1830s, Swiss naturalists established the existence of the Ice Age. Their key insight was the fact that the small glaciers found at high elevations in mountainous regions were remnants of vast sheets of ice that once had covered large portions of the earth’s surface. They combined ma...

Landscapes subject to constant forcing tend to evolve toward equilibrium states in which individual landforms have similar characteristics. Yet, even in landscapes at or near equilibrium, there can be significant variability among individual landforms. Furthermore, sites subject to similar processes and conditions can have different mean landform characteristics. This variability is often ascri...

Rural history and implementing agri-policy are mirrored in an agricultural landscape. No doubt, the basic structure and composition of agricultural landscape depends on local climatic and natural conditions. There is a close connection between agricultural landscape management and biodiversity management at the gene, species and habitat level. The purpose of this paper is to present four ways t...