Research:

Frameworks for landscape ecology and habitat fragmentation

Ongoing habitat loss throughout the world continues to influence landscape structure by leading to increased fragmentation. Accumulating research has provided insight regarding the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on biodiversity. While these results provide an essential first step to a comprehensive understanding of habitat fragmentation, our ability to predict when and why fragmentation may be important is a critical, though unexplored, concept for conservation.

The Fletcher lab has ongoing research aimed at placing landscape issues into mechanistic and predictive frameworks that better allow understanding the consequences of habitat loss and fragmentation. To interpret the utility of these frameworks, we explicitly test predictions from these frameworks with data on the behavior of organisms faced with increasing fragmentation.

PIs, collaborators, and lab members: Rob Fletcher, Nate Marcy, Divya Vasudev, Leslie Ries (Univ. Maryland), James Battin (NOAA), Anna Chalfoun (Univ. Wyoming).