Fragmented forests and heterogeneous landscapes are likely to have less natural vegetation and smaller core areas, a low degree of landscape connectivity, high prevalence of anthropogenic edges, and high landscape heterogeneity, which may alter at varying degrees behavior of wildlife species such as attacks on humans.
Habitat bordering PA's and the wildlife that use it are threatened by a wide-range of anthropogenic pressures (e.g., edge effects, fragmentation, and introduced predators) and this situation is particularly acute for low-density, poorly studied carnivore communities.
These studies ignore the fact that edge effects, such as anthropogenic fire, reach their maximum well before habitat connectivity is lost and may create positive feedbacks that result in further fragmentation.
Maintaining connectivity with source populations is especially important for populations of boreal species at the southern edge of their distributions, where anthropogenic disturbance and climate change can be a threat.
Populations at the southern edge of their historical distribution, where anthropogenic impacts on the freshwater environment may be greater, have suffered the largest decline.
In the Northern Rocky Mountains of the United States, disturbance-caused forest edges are a common feature in the landscape with anthropogenic (e.g. roadside, clearcut) and natural (e.g. burned, windthrown) edge types.
The assessment of forest fragmentation in the temporal domain by the detection of new forest edges can be useful in this respect, because forest edges have greater human access and associated anthropogenic effects and have been shown to have significantly less biomass, increased tree mortality and lower biodiversity, all characteristics of degradation [39, 44, 74 77].
The persistence of natural metapopulations may depend on subpopulations that exist at the edges of species ranges, removed from anthropogenic stress.
We further explain variation in raven occurrence along anthropogenic features based on the amount of non-native vegetation and cover type edge, such that ravens select fragmented sagebrush stands with patchy, exotic vegetative introgression.
Anthropogenic fire is a high risk in the densely wooded areas at the edge of the urban core and in some ravines, especially in the Bellavista Park area.
