Modelling the Impact of Landscape Fragmentation on Forest Ecological Functionality
The biological diversity of forests and of other natural or semi-natural environments is threatened by human induced habitat loss and fragmentation. These changes to forest spatial patterns may impact on their ecological functions and alter their ability to resist and respond to external disturbing...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Instituto Politécnico de Bragança
2010
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC61729 http://www.ipb.pt/iufro2010/ |
| Summary: | The biological diversity of forests and of other natural or semi-natural environments is threatened by human induced habitat loss and fragmentation. These changes to forest spatial patterns may impact on their ecological functions and alter their ability to resist and respond to external disturbing factors. A number of indicators have been proposed to assess changes to the spatial patterns of forests but relatively few evaluate the ecological impact of such changes. This paper present results from a project to link and harmonise the analyses of forests spatial patterns at European, National and Regional scales, and improve the ecological evaluation of forests vulnerability and resilience. The work is based on the use of GIS fuzzy Multi Criteria Evaluation (MCE) modelling to relate changes to forest spatial patterns with the ecological functions. The results are presented for seven study areas from five different biogeographical regions across Europe, evaluating the impact of changes to forest patterns on five species specific models (one butterfly: Apatura ilia; one small mammal: Martes martes; one bird: Picoides minor; and two large mammals: Canis lupus and Capreolus capreolus), on one species-unspecific model and for two spatial scales. The results demonstrate that the proposed method may be operationally applied. In general, the aggregation of the species-specific models tend to have the same temporal trend as the unspecific model and for this reason it may be considered as a simple model for an operative application at pan-European level. However, the results are scale-dependent and demonstrates the necessaity for high resolution multi-temporal forest maps. Moreover, further speciesspecific information is need to support ecological modeling to effectively evaluate the impact of changes to the spatial pattern of forests on target species. JRC.DDG.H.7 - Land management and natural hazards |
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