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Resource description:
Edge effects are among the key processes affecting biological populations and communities in fragmented landscapes, mediating landscape-scale patterns in species richness and abundance. This has been the subject of intense research over the past decades, demonstrating that edge-responses are species-specific, though there is often major intraspecific variation in relation to a range of factors such as edge characteristics and landscape context.
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Requirements:
- This study examined this issue using a combination of observational, experimental and modelling approaches, analysing how and why responses to wooded edges by open farmland birds are scaled by other ecological variables.
- This study also combined land use information and ecologically scaled edge response functions derived at local scale, to predict the consequences for species abundances and distribution at biogeographic scale under different land use scenarios.
Advantages:
- The study provided novel scientific information on the ecology of fragmented landscapes
- Gathering much needed information for agricultural land planning, the work has strong relevance for conservation management of fragmented landscapes, given the current trends for afforestation and scrub encroachment in arable landscapes.
Constraints:
- None
Licence:
- Free, no licence
Development stage:
- Full, working product