Archive for the ‘habitat fragmentation’ Tag

Creating a safety net for spiders

As I mentioned in my last post, we are still very much in the beginning stages of understanding spider conservation. At this point, it may be that we can really only speak to general trends, rather than specific conservation situations, but certainly we’ve got a starting point. Spiders are particularly sensitive to vegetative structure, meaning […]

Tracing the thread

When I started looking into spider conservation, I wasn’t sure how much information I would find, but I assumed that there was a growing body of literature. And that is accurate, although I was surprised to see how much of it was about the impact of land management practices on spider communities in general. There […]

Building a better squirrel conservation program

In my last post, I provided a long (and depressing) list of squirrel species and subspecies facing challenging situations. The very good news is that there are quite a few people conducting research to better understand exactly why certain populations are in decline and how to most effectively reverse those trends. Not all of their […]

The many faces of Prof. Squirrel

When I said last week that I was interested in squirrel conservation, I had imagined that I would find a lot of papers talking about the decline of European red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) in response to the presence of gray squirrels in the UK- and, I did. But I also found so much more: more […]

The large carnivore in the room

In the past few years there has been an emphasis on assessing what makes a carnivore conservation effort successful (or not) and what the long-term prospects are for the variety of strategies in use. The reality is that there is no magic bullet or guarantee of success, but we certainly have a better sense of […]

What it means to live large

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 […]

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 […]