When looking at large carnivore conservation this past week, it became evident that there are lots of layers to this topic. It’s about more than habitat availability or prey populations- it also includes the individuality of species and human attitudes. To begin with, there is the nature of carnivore ecology– these animals have large home […]
Archive for the ‘Habitat Loss and Fragmentation’ Category
What it means to live large
Is there room at the top?
A friend of mine recently returned from a year of field work in the Southwest- she’s investigating how carnivore species respond to each other and different levels of human activity in an arid environment. Some of the pictures from her camera traps make me completely jealous- she’s dealing with mountain lions and badgers and ringtails, […]
A wild-managed yard of one’s own
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at research on how we manage our yards and how those decisions impact the ecosystems around us. Certainly when we mow or fertilize or add ornamental species to our lawns we are altering the space, but there are other ways that we interact with our yards and […]
Where the grass is greener
Some of the more recent research into lawn science has focused on the people-yard relationship and how different management practices influence the lawns we see. Starting with the first of those, why do we put so much effort into lawns? Some researchers have suggested that our yards are a statement about how we want to […]
Monocultures in miniature?
In my last post I mentioned that I was pretty impressed with the amount of land currently devoted to our lawns- after looking through some research into lawn management and diversity starting in the late 1960s, I realized that this area had almost doubled in about 35 years. In 1969 almost 68,000 square kilometers of […]
A nation of farmers?
Last week I came across a reference to the sheer number of acres currently used by our lawns and was pretty impressed at the full extent of the area we water, trim, and curate (around 128,000 square kilometers, which means it uses several times the space used by farmers to grow corn, according to Cristina […]
Getting our hands dirty
Although some plant species are doing very well around the world (sometimes to the point of becoming invasive), other species are losing ground. In some cases there are focused recovery plans, but oftentimes the issue of habitat loss trumps our best efforts to sustain these populations. So how can we contribute to both habitat availability […]
Connecting the dots
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at the issue of habitat fragmentation in respect to how it divides populations and presents barriers to animal movement which can limit reproductive success and gene flow. When I started gathering information on how to combat and mitigate habitat fragmentation, most of the resources I came across […]
Trapped by the matrix
In my last post, I looked at the consequences of habitat fragmentation when we build roads or dams or other physical structures- we construct barriers that are useful to us, but not so helpful to the plant and animal populations we isolate. And sometimes we create obstacles to movement even when we think we’re making […]
Why didn’t the beetle cross the road?
As I have mentioned before, habitat fragmentation is one of the primary issues facing species around the world today- while it is far too big a topic to tackle in its entirety during one month’s posts, I think that investigating a few of its manifestations is manageable. I also think it’s necessary, since we have […]