Sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasiamus) occur in regions that are spatially diverse and temporally dynamic in western North America. During the past 130 years, significant changes in disturbance regimes have affected their habitat. Plant communities in existence today are unique from any other time period because of altered disturbance regimes, confounded by a continual change in climate. In so...

Intertidal rocky reefs are complex and rich ecosystems that are vulnerable to even the smallest fluctuations in sea level. We modelled habitat loss associated with sea level rise for intertidal rocky reefs using GIS, high-resolution digital imagery, and LIDAR technology at fine-scale resolution (0.1 m per pixel). We used projected sea levels of +0.3 m, +0.5 m and +1.0 m above current Mean Low T...

Strategies for conserving plant diversity in agroecosystems generally focus on either expanding land area in non-crop habitat or enhancing diversity within crop fields through changes in within-field management practices. In this study, we compare effects on landscape-scale species richness from such land-sharing or land-sparing strategies. We collected data in arable field, grassland, pasture,...

Caribou are an integral component of high-latitude ecosystems and represent a major subsistence food source for many northern people. The availability and quality of winter habitat is critical to sustain these caribou populations. Caribou commonly use older spruce woodlands with adequate terrestrial lichen, a preferred winter forage, in the understory. Changes in climate and fire regime pose a ...

We derive a comprehensive overview of specialization evolution based on analytical results and numerical illustrations. We study the separate and joint evolution of two critical facets of specialization-local adaptation and habitat choice-under different life cycles, modes of density regulation, variance-covariance structures, and trade-off strengths. A particular feature of our analysis is the...

Many species are more restricted in their habitat associations at the leading edges of their range margins, but some species have broadened their habitat associations in these regions during recent climate change. We examine the effects of multiple, interacting climatic variables on spatial and temporal patterns of species' habitat associations, using the speckled wood butterfly, Pararge aegeri...

Predicting species' responses to the combined effects of habitat and climate changes has become a major challenge in ecology and conservation biology. However, the effects of climatic and habitat gradients on species distributions have generally been considered separately. Here, we explore the relationships between the habitat and thermal dimensions of the ecological niche in European common bi...

Animals often change their habitat throughout ontogeny; yet, the triggers for habitat transitions and how these correlate with developmental changes - e.g. physiological, morphological and behavioural - remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated how ontogenetic changes in body coloration and of the visual system relate to habitat transitions in a coral reef fish. Adult dusky dottybacks, Pseu...

Understanding species-habitat relationships is vital to successful conservation, but the tools used to communicate species-habitat relationships are often poorly suited to the information needs of conservation practitioners. Here we present a novel method for translating a statistical species-habitat model, a regression analysis relating ring-necked pheasant abundance to landcover, into an inte...