Treesearch

How do land management decisions shape landscapes decades into the future? With the influence of climate change and its associated stressors, it’s an increasingly thorny question. According to Paulette Ford, a research ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “Land managers were coming to me and saying, ‘The rain’s coming too late in the season,’ or ‘We’ve got these weird fire cycles.’ What they’re talking about is unprecedented events and climate variability.”

With increasing loss and fragmentation of habitats driving the emerging global extinction crisis, paired with limited resources for conservation, there is an immense need to identify and prioritize the most important areas for conservation actions. The goal of this study was to measure, map and rank core areas and corridors for mainland clouded leopard (a forest indicator species) across its entire range in Southeast Asia. We used an empirically based landscape resistance model developed from range‐wide camera survey data, cumulative resistant kernel analysis to define core areas and...

After decades of political and economic isolation, Myanmar is now the focus of large international investments, particularly from China, which raises questions of how to balance national development with safeguarding the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot.

Understanding the genetic basis underlying the local adaptation of nonmodel species is a fundamental goal in evolutionary biology. In this study, we explored the genetic mechanisms of the local adaptation of Forsythia suspensa using genome sequence and population genomics data obtained from specific-locus amplified fragment sequencing. We assembled a high-quality reference genome of weeping forsythia (Scaffold N50 = 7.3 Mb) using ultralong Nanopore reads. Then, genome-wide comparative analysis was performed for 15 natural populations of weeping forsythia across its current distribution...

With accelerating global declines in biodiversity, establishment and expansion of conservation areas (CAs) have increasingly been advocated in recent decades. Gap analysis has been useful to evaluate the sufficiency and performance of CAs. Objectives Researchers often identify putative gaps in the protection of biodiversity in CA networks, drawing on evidence from species occurrence patterns (i.e., representation), yet the effect on the gap analyses of the spatial configuration of CAs is poorly understood.

Habitat loss and fragmentation are major threats to global biodiversity. Felids, among the many taxa experiencing population declines and range contraction around the world, are known as ecologically and politically powerful levers in conservation programs. Many felids are wide-ranging, and therefore, identifying and conserving their core habitat patches and corridors is essential for developing an umbrella strategy for protecting coexisting species. We employed a multi-scale, multi-species approach to model habitat suitability and connectivity for six felids across Iran. We identified...

Replicated multiple scale species distribution models (SDMs) have become increasingly important to identify the correct variables determining species distribution and their influences on ecological responses. This study explores multi-scale habitat relationships of the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) in two study areas on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of western China. Our primary objectives were to evaluate the degree to which snow leopard habitat relationships, expressed by predictors, scales of response, and magnitude of effects, were consistent across study areas or locally landcape-specifi...

The island of Borneo is a biodiversity hotspot of global importance that continues to suffer from one of the highest deforestation rates in the tropics. Selective logging concessions overlay a third of the remaining natural forests in the Indonesian part of Borneo, but many of these concessions have become inactive in recent years. Whereas the cessation of logging could be beneficial to biodiversity, the absence of a logging company's presence in the forest could also leave the concession open to deforestation by other actors. Using remote sensing analyses, we evaluate 1) whether inactive...

Landscape science relies on foundational concepts of landscape ecology and seeks to understand the physical, biological, and human components of ecosystems to support land management decision-making. Incorporating landscape science into land management decisions, however, remains challenging. Many lands in the western United States are federally owned and managed for multiple uses, including recreation, conservation, and energy development.

Dispersal plays a key role in linking populations, habitat (re)-colonization, and species range expansion. As fragmentation and habitat loss are ubiquitous threats and can disrupt dispersal, landscape connectivity modeling has become a valuable tool in conservation planning.