Tag Archives: Circuit Theory

Issue 8.4: Technological Advances at the Interface of Ecology and Statistics

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Issue 8.4 is now online!

The April issue of Methods, which includes our latest Special Feature – “Technological Advances at the Interface of Ecology and Statistics” – is now online!

This new Special Feature is a collection of five articles (plus an Editorial from Guest Editor David Warton) inspired by the December 2015 Eco-Stats conference at the University of New South Wales in Australia. It shows how interdisciplinary collaboration help to solve problems around estimating biodiversity and how it changes over space and time.

The five articles are based on joint talks given at the conference. They focus on:

As David Warton states in his Editorial, “interdisciplinary collaboration and the opportunities offered by recent technological advances have potential to lead to interesting and sometimes surprising findings, and will continue to be fertile ground for scientists in the foreseeable future”. Meetings like Eco-Stats 15 and Special Features like this one will, hopefully, help to encourage these sorts of collaborative research projects.

All of the articles in the ‘Technological Advances at the Interface of Ecology and Statistics‘ Special Feature will be freely available for a limited time.
Continue reading →

Planning Habitat for Very Long-Distance Connectivity under Climate Change

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Post provided by JENNY HODGSON

Climate change and habitat fragmentation are interacting threats: it is likely that many species cannot reach newly suitable areas at the cool edge of their range because there is not enough habitat, in the right places, to support range expansion over multiple generations. Conservation efforts are already underway to restore large areas of habitat, and to improve the “connectivity” within networks of habitat. However, there are multiple ways of measuring connectivity and few of them address the scale of shifts that are likely to be needed under climate change. This could be a problem if it leads to inefficient conservation prioritisation.

The Conductance Metric

How conductance generally depends on the amount of habitat in the landscape. Squares show the conductance of landscapes with a random selection of cells chosen to be habitat. The red line is based only on the 100% point and the expectation that conductance is proportional to amount of habitat squared.

How conductance generally depends on the amount of habitat in the landscape. Squares show the conductance of landscapes with a random selection of cells chosen to be habitat. The red line is based only on the 100% point and the expectation that conductance is proportional to amount of habitat squared.

We first developed the conductance metric in 2012 and we found that it is correlated to the speed with which a species can spread through a landscape, from a specified source location to a specified target. A key difference between this and most other connectivity metrics is that it incorporates both reproduction within habitat patches and dispersal between habitat patches, over multiple generations (further explanation here). Sometimes there could be many very well-connected patches in a network, and yet no easy way for a species to cross the landscape from end to end. This could be a problem for the species’ survival, if staying within its current regions of occupancy is unsustainable, for example if it is being pushed northwards by climate change. Continue reading →