Testing theory in landscape ecology

This branch of my research program is all about developing new theories or refining existing theory in landscape ecology, and using fied observations to test those theories. This work is very collaborative, and a lot of the data we use to test theories comes from the BIOFrag network. Some of the major insights to emerge from this work include:

• Documentation of widespread edge effects from many taxonomic groups in terrestrial landscapes around the world

• Demonstration that landscapes without a history of frequent disturbance contain many edge-sensitive species, whereas disturbance-prone landscapes contain edge-resistant species

• A perspective on why fragmentation effects at the landscape scale may not be pervasively negative

• Evidence of widespread support for the fundamental predictions of the habitat amount hypothesis

• Conditions likely to promote biodiversity preservation in human-dominated landscapes

• A framework for rethinking the SLOSS debate in light of relatively little evidence for the idea that a single large reserve houses more species than several small reserves of the same total area