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EMS Studies at the Individual, Patch, and Landscape Scale: Designing Landscapes to Measure Scale-Specific Responses to Habitat Fragmentation

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Landscape Ecology of Small Mammals

Abstract

Ecologists have long recognized that the habitats of species are patchy at some spatial scale, that habitats vary in quality, and that most populations exhibit substantial demographic and spatial structure that is, in some way, related to this variability. Inequalities in the capacity of local habitat patches to produce or absorb dispersing individuals creates a regional population dynamic with a hierarchical demographic component—birth and death schedules often reflect local conditions, and the emigration and immigration of individuals over sites reflects regional or landscape ones (Pulliam 1988, Tilman et al. 1994). Differences in the quality of local habitats tend to increase the variability in species abundances over sites, whereas dispersal (immigration and emigration) of individuals among sites can even it out (Vance 1984, Bowers and Dooley 1991). Connecting processes working at the local, metapopulation, and regional scales has become a goal of landscape ecology (Forman and Godron 1986, Turner 1989, Noss 1991, Wiens 1995). Hence, despite the original intent of landscape ecology to be holistic (Forman and Godron 1986, Pickett and Cadenasso 1995), predictions about landscape-level processes are becoming increasingly specific and mechanistic (Wiens et al. 1993).

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Authors
  1. Michael A. Bowers
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  2. James L. Dooley Jr.
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Ecology, The University of Georgia, 30602, Athens, GA, USA

    Gary W. Barrett

  2. Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, The University of Georgia, 29802, Aiken, SC, USA

    John D. Peles

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Bowers, M.A., Dooley, J.L. (1999). EMS Studies at the Individual, Patch, and Landscape Scale: Designing Landscapes to Measure Scale-Specific Responses to Habitat Fragmentation. In: Barrett, G.W., Peles, J.D. (eds) Landscape Ecology of Small Mammals. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-21622-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-21622-5_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-5640-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-21622-5

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