Climate change affects both habitat suitability and the genetic diversity of wild plants. Therefore, predicting and establishing the most effective and coherent conservation areas is essential for the conservation of genetic diversity in response to climate change. This is because genetic variance is a product not only of habitat suitability in conservation areas but also of efficient protectio...

Land cover change has been one of the major drivers of change leading to an alteration of critical habitats for many of the threatened species worldwide. Species with a narrow range and specialized habitats such as wetland ecosystems are at higher risk. The present paper describes spatial and temporal land use and cover change over the period of last 34 years (1976–2010) in the Koshi Tappu Wild...

Habitat split is a major force behind the worldwide decline of amphibian populations, causing community change in richness and species composition. In fragmented landscapes, natural remnants, the terrestrial habitat of the adults, are frequently separated from streams, the aquatic habitat of the larvae. An important question is how this landscape configuration affects population levels and if i...

Markets for biodiversity have generated much controversy because of the often unstated and untested assumptions included in transactions rules. Simple trading rules are favored to reduce transaction costs, but others have argued that this leads to markets that favor development and erode biodiversity. Here, I describe how embracing complexity and uncertainty within a tradable credit system for ...

It is important to understand the relative effects of landscape habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, and matrix quality on biodiversity, so that potential management options can be appropriately ranked. However, their effects and relative importance may change with the size of the landscape considered because the multiple (and potentially conflicting) ecological processes that are influenced by...

The Central Valley of California is one of the most important regions for wintering waterbirds in North America despite extensive anthropogenic landscape modification and decline of historical wetlands there. Like many other mediterranean-climate ecosystems across the globe, the Central Valley has been subject to a burgeoning human population and expansion and intensification of agricultural an...

Despite the importance of habitat in determining species distribution and persistence, habitat dynamics are rarely modeled in studies of metapopulations. We used an integrated habitat-occupancy model to simultaneously quantify habitat change, site fidelity, and local colonization and extinction rates for larvae of a suite of Great Plains stream fishes in the Arikaree River, eastern Colorado, US...

It remains a challenge to identify the geographical patterns and underlying environmental associations of species with unique ecological niches and distinct behaviors. This in turn hinders our understanding of the ecology as well as effective conservation management of threatened species. The white-eared night heron (Gorsachius magnificus) is a non-migratory nocturnal bird species that has a pa...

1. I synthesize the understanding of the relationship between landscape structure and animal movement in human-modified landscapes. 2. The variety of landscape structures is first classified into four categories: continuous habitat, patchy habitat with high-quality matrix, patchy habitat with low-quality matrix, and patchy, ephemeral habitat. Using this simplification I group the range of evolv...

Habitat clearance remains the major cause of biodiversity loss, with consequences for ecosystem services and for people. In response to this, many global conservation schemes direct funds to regions with high rates of recent habitat destruction, though some also emphasize the conservation of remaining large tracts of intact habitat. If the pattern of habitat clearance is highly contagious, the ...