Behavioral Model Systems

The impact of habitat loss and fragmentation of remaining habitats on the distribution, persistence, and metapopulation dynamics of plants and animals is a major concern in conservation biology and landscape ecology (Harris 1984, Wiens et al. 1993, Lidicker 1995, Hanski and Gilpin 1997). Much of our understanding of how habitat loss and fragmentation affect native populations is through retrospection, speculation, or modeling rather than by direct quantification or experimentation. Evidence of whether or not experimental and observational studies corroborate or substantiate predictions of mathematical models is equivocal (Lamberson et al. 1994, Schumaker 1996). One of the reasons for this discrepancy is that species within a taxon often are treated as mathematical entities (i.e., all individuals are “average”) and individual-, sex-, and species-specific differences in response to fragmentation are not taken into account (Andren 1994, Lima and Zollner 1996). Some of the differences in species responses to fragmentation can be explained by differences in their behavioral systems, dispersal ability, life history, trophic level, sociality, and overall responses to changes in habitat size, connectivity, and type of matrix.