As habitats become fragmented, edges become longer.
We live in an age of fragmentation: fragmented communities, fragmented lives, fragmented attention.
We investigated how the species richness of different functional groups of tropical rainforest birds varied in remnant rainforest patches embedded in two matrix types (mining vs. agricultural) at two distances to forest edge in fragmented Upper Guinean rainforest landscapes of southwest Ghana.
While northern populations are well connected by continuous patches of F. vesiculosus, populations at the southern edge were fragmented and spatially isolated prior to extinction, potentially limiting population size and increasing susceptibility to drastic demographic and genetic variation.
They expected that a weaker regulation of species recruitment by natural enemies would reduce seedling diversity near the edges of fragmented, human-modified forests.
We expected that weaker top-down regulation of species recruitment by natural enemies would be associated with loss of seedling diversity near edges in fragmented, human-modified forests6,9.
Left to its own devices, experts have long believed, a wild species will persist most abundantly and robustly in the center of its geographical range; populations at the edges are fragmented, disjointed, isolated, ephemeral -- and more likely to die out.
When these natural areas are less fragmented, they have fewer edges, meaning they dry out less quickly and maintain enough moisture to nourish the nectar plants that feed the butterflies, Oliver says.
Moreover, these similar edges are fragmented and do not belong to well-connected modules.
Conversely, during the rainy season, conditions at the edges of fragmented forests, where human settlements are often located, become favorable for larval habitats, rendering villagers susceptible to the disease (6 ).
Relative to intact forest plots, the proportion of edge species in fragmented forest plots significantly increased and the proportion of understory shade and understory sun species in fragmented forest plots decreased.
