With human activities increasingly altering species abundance around the world, researchers have the opportunity and the challenge to better understand the processes affecting the distributions of species. Affecting these processes are human decisions about where and how activities will be focused in any given landscape. The factor that most significantly influences contemporary land-use change is exurbanization, low-density residential development outside of urban areas that contributes to habitat loss and fragmentation. Relatively little research exists to understand the patterns of species in exurban environments, however. The importance of developed and non-developed landscape level patterns of habitat structure in determining species' distributions and the human factors that influence those changes are not well understood. This research project will begin the process of examining whether habitat structural and/or human mechanisms change biotic integrity in exurban systems consistently, such that these can be predicted across sites. This effort will contribute to basic understanding of how hierarchical theory explains the biogeography of exurban systems. The investigators will conduct a comparative analysis between two structurally different habitat types (interior forest, and forest/shrub/grassland mosaic). Comparative analyses will be executed at sites in upstate New York and southwestern Montana. Analyses will compare bird biotic integrity across sites and address how landowner characteristics influence local habitat management.
Previous research indicates that rural (exurban) development alters species distributions. Few studies have addressed structurally different ecosystems to derive a more mechanistic understanding of the biological changes that occur due to exurban development. The results of this study will help advance scientific understanding by developing methods and key hypotheses for a novel interdisciplinary analytical approach incorporating biogeography, landscape ecology, biology, and social science. These results will serve as a tool to predict which types of landscapes may be more vulnerable to human perturbations. The project will integrate biogeographical and sociological information that will allow the development of tools to effectively focus resources and potentially alter landowner behavior as needed. The pertinent results will be shared with local stakeholders. This effort offers educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. Finally, this project will provide a platform from which to pursue further interdisciplinary inquiry into mechanisms affecting the spatial distribution of biota.
