Introduction: Bats are threatened by agricultural intensification, and although bat ecology in agricultural landscapes is in the focus of current research, the effects of interacting spatiotemporal factors on species-specific bat activity above farmland remain understudied. Our aim was to identify spatiotemporal factors and their interactions relevant for the activity of bat species above conve...

Facilitation processes constitute basic elements of vegetation dynamics in harsh systems. Recent studies in tropical alpine environments demonstrated how pioneer plant species defined as "ecosystem engineers" are capable of enhancing landscape-level richness by adding new species to the community through the modification of microhabitats, and also provided hints about the alternation of differe...

Climate change is likely to produce more frequent and longer droughts in the Mediterranean region, like that of 1994, which produced important changes in the Quercus ilex forests, with up to 76% of the trees showing complete canopy dieback. At the landscape level, a mosaic of responses to the drought was observed, linked to the distribution of lithological substrates. Damage to the dominant tre...

Impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation on distribution and population size of many taxa are well established. In contrast, less is known about the role of within-patch habitat quality for the spatial dynamics of species, even though within-patch habitat quality may substantially influence the dynamics of population networks. We studied occurrence patterns of two Orthopteran species in relati...

There is a public perception that large high-severity wildfires decrease biodiversity and increase fire hazard by homogenizing vegetation composition and increasing the cover of mid-story vegetation. But a growing literature suggests that vegetation responses are nuanced. LiDAR technology provides a promising remote sensing tool to test hypotheses about post-fire vegetation regrowth because veg...

The Great Chaco is a region of nearly 1,000,000 km2 extended through the plains of Northern and central Argentina, Western Paraguay, Southeastern Bolivia, and the extreme Western edge of Mato Grosso do Sul state in Brazil (Pennington et al. 2000). Originally dominated by xerophytic semi-deciduous forests, the area has been extensively cleared for timber production and agriculture over the last ...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS), often referred to as lidar or laser altimetry, is a remote sensing technique which was originally designed to measure the topography of the Earth’s surface. While the first commercially available airborne laser scanners recorded only the time of one backscattered pulse, state-of-the-art systems record several echoes for each emitted laser pulse. Thereby a 3D data ...

Conceived to combat widescale biodiversity erosion in farmland, agri-environment schemes have largely failed to deliver their promises despite massive financial support. While several common species have shown to react positively to existing measures, rare species have continued to decline in most European countries. Of particular concern is the status of insectivorous farmland birds that forag...

© WILDLIFE BIOLOGY · 9:4 (2003) In landscapes altered by human activities, many species are restricted to small patches of habitat. Species that were once common have decreased both in distribution and density, and many have become extinct (Ceballos & Ehrlich 2002), mainly due to habitat deterioration, loss and fragmentation (Hilton-Taylor 2000). Previously contiguous populations have been turn...