This paper investigates the effect of a dynamic landscape on the persistence of many interacting species. We develop a multi-species community model with an evolving landscape in which the creation and destruction of habitat are dynamic and local in space. Species interactions are also local involving hierarchical competitive trade-offs. We show that dynamic landscapes can reverse the trend of ...

Northern Spotted Owls, Strix occidentalis caurina, require large tracts of old-growth conifer forest to survive and reproduce. Much of this forest has been or is being cut by commercial logging operations, with uncertain consequences for the owls. In this paper I present simulation models of owl population change over the next 100 years, as summing a variety of scenarios for habitat destruction...

Relatively speaking, the conservation of mammals, birds and other large terrestrial vertebrates is a simple task. The bulk of species are described, their ecologies are reasonably well known, the threats to their habitat or breeding systems are often documented, and the funding to implement recovery programmes readily available; e.g. mammals and birds are charismatic and the general public are ...

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...

Pangolins are unique placental mammals with eight species existing in the world, which have adapted to a highly specialized diet of ants and termites, and are of significance in the control of forest termite disaster. Besides their ecological value, pangolins are extremely important economic animals with the value as medicine and food. At present, illegal hunting and habitat destruction have dr...

Organisms often exhibit behavioral or phenotypic diversity to improve population fitness in the face of environmental variability. When each behavior or phenotype is individually maladaptive, alternating between these losing strategies can counter-intuitively result in population persistence-an outcome similar to the Parrondo's paradox. Instead of the capital or history dependence that characte...

with other factors affecting biodiversity? Very — but it tends to act over a longer time scale. The ecological disruption wrought by climate change is generally slower than that caused by other factors. Such factors include habitat destruction through changes in land use; pollution, for example by nitrogen deposition; the invasion of ecosystems by non-native plant and animal species (biotic exc...

If habitat destruction or overexploitation of populations is severe, species loss can occur directly and abruptly. Yet the final descent to extinction is often driven by synergistic processes (amplifying feedbacks) that can be disconnected from the original cause of decline. We review recent observational, experimental and meta-analytic work which together show that owing to interacting and sel...

Amphibian declines are seen as an indicator of the onset of a sixth mass extinction of life on earth. Because of a combination of factors such as habitat destruction, emerging pathogens and pollutants, over 156 amphibian species have not been seen for several decades, and 34 of these were listed as extinct by 2004. Here we report the rediscovery of the Hula painted frog, the first amphibian to ...

The spatial scaling of stability is key to understanding ecological sustainability across scales and the sensitivity of ecosystems to habitat destruction. Here we propose the invariability-area relationship (IAR) as a novel approach to investigate the spatial scaling of stability. The shape and slope of IAR are largely determined by patterns of spatial synchrony across scales. When synchrony de...