9 10 Received: 20 March 2006 / Accepted: 21 February 2007 11 The Ecological Society of Japan 2007 23456 17 18 Abstract Habitat size, habitat isolation and habitat 19 quality are regarded as the main determinants of but20 terfly occurrence in fragmented landscapes. To analyze 21 the relationship between the occurrence of the butterfly 22 Cupido minimus and these factors, patch occupancy of 23 th...

Modelling metapopulation dynamics is a potentially very powerful tool for conservation biologists. In recent years, scientists have broadened the range of variables incorporated into metapopulation modelling from using almost exclusively habitat patch size and isolation, to the inclusion of attributes of the matrix and habitat patch quality. We investigated the influence of habitat patch and ma...

Habitat fragmentation exacerbates the problem of habitat loss for grassland and wetland birds. Remaining patches of grasslands and wetlands may be too small, too isolated, and too influenced by edge effects to maintain viable populations of some breeding birds. Knowledge of the effects of fragmentation on bird populations is critically important for decisions about reserve design, grassland and...

The single large or several small (SLOSS) problem has been addressed in a large number of empirical and theoretical studies, but no coherent conclusion has yet been reached. Here I study the SLOSS problem in the context of metapopulation dynamics. I assume that there is a fixed total amount A(0) of habitat available, and I derive formulas for the optimal number n and area A of habitat patches, ...

Organisms with different life-histories and abilities to disperse often utilise habitat patches in different ways. We investigated the influence of the size of patches of rock (separated by stretches of sand) on the density of pulmonate limpets (Siphonaria spp.) along 1500 km of the linear landscape of the South African coastline. We compared the influence of patch-size on two congeneric specie...

We examine habitat size, shape, and arrangement effects on populations using a discrete reaction-diffusion model. Diffusion is modeled passively and applied to a cellular grid of territories forming a coupled map lattice. Dispersal mortality is proportional to the amount of nonhabitat and fully occupied habitat surrounding a given cell, with distance decay. After verifying that our model produc...

BACKGROUND Dispersal events between habitat patches in a landscape mosaic can structure ecological communities and influence the functioning of agrosystems. Here we investigated whether short-distance dispersal events between vineyard and forest patches shape foliar fungal communities. We hypothesized that these communities homogenize between habitats over the course of the growing season, part...

Network theoretic approach has been used to model and study the flow of ecological information, growth and connectivity on landscape level of anemochory plant species Abied pindrow, Betula utilis and Taxus wallichiana in the Western Himalaya region. A network is formally defined and derived for seed dispersion model of aforementioned species where vertices represent habitat patches which are co...

I analyze stochastic patch occupancy models (SPOMs), which record habitat patches as empty or occupied. A problem with SPOMs has been that if the spatial structure of a heterogeneous habitat patch network is taken into account, the computational effort needed to analyze a SPOM grows as a power of 2n, where n is the number of habitat patches. I propose a computationally feasible approximation me...

As the human population expands, landscapes worldwide are becoming fragmented into remnant patches of original habitat, surrounded by agriculture and other human land uses. With diminishing opportunities to preserve large tracts of pristine habitat, the future of biodiversity conservation lies increasingly in these fragmented areas. Therefore, understanding the processes at work in fragmented l...