Many populations exhibit pronounced spatial structure: dispersed areas of high population density embedded in areas of low density, with population centers connected through dispersal. This recognition has led many conservation biologists to embrace the metapopulation concept (Levins 1970) as the appropriate paradigm for reserve design structures (reviewed in Hanski 1991 and Harrison 1994). Thi...

This paper presents the first systematic study of the vegetation history of a range of low hills in SW England, UK, lying between more researched fenlands and uplands. After the palaeoecological sites were located bespoke archaeological, historical and documentary studies of the surrounding landscape were undertaken specifically to inform palynological interpretation at each site. The region ha...

There is considerable interest in determining whether the species richness of communities is determined by forces controlling dispersal into patches that operate at the landscape scale, or forces controlling persistence that act at the local scale. Understanding the relative importance of these two classes of factors in controlling within-patch species richness is particularly important when pa...

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...

The persistence of landscape-scale disturbance legacies in forested ecosystems depends in part on the nature and strength of feedback among disturbances, their effects, and subsequent recovery processes such as tree regeneration and canopy closure. We investigated factors affecting forest recovery rates over a 25-year time period in a large (6 million ha) landscape where geopolitical boundaries...

Amazonian rainforests sustain some of the richest tree communities on Earth, but their ecological and evolutionary responses to human threats remain poorly known. We used one of the largest experimental datasets currently available on tree dynamics in fragmented tropical forests and a recent phylogeny of angiosperms to test whether tree communities have lost phylogenetic diversity since their i...

Simple analytical models assuming homogeneous space have been used to examine the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on metapopulation size. The models predict an extinction threshold, a critical amount of suitable habitat below which the metapopulation goes deterministically extinct. The consequences of non-random loss of habitat for species with localized dispersal have been studied ma...

A critical handicap to tropical biodiversity conservation efforts in agroecosystems is the unknowns regarding the influence of landscape-scale factors on the persistence of species. To address these uncertainties, we explored two essential landscape-scale questions, within India’s biologically-rich Western Ghats, examining two nearby human-dominated landscapes that dramatically differed in thei...