EE BIOL 116 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Habitat Fragmentation, Atlantic Forest, Mount Everest

• School: UCLA
• Department: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• Course: EE BIOL 116
• Professor: Rundel, P.W.Wayne, R.

Document Summary

Rapid deforestation from people wanting to live by the coast. Taking natural habitat and transforming it to something useful us to live and grow. Fundamental problem in conservation bio: habitat fragmentation. Where the atlantic rainforest used to be, it"s now just brown. Europe in particular; much of the natural environment that currently exists there is severely altered and intensely managed. India: so many people that there are hardly any natural habitat left; in the himalayas. China: heavy industry and loss of habitat from a variety of processes such as damming. Madagascar: lemurs aren"t found anywhere else and it has been estimated that in 20-30 years there may no longer be any lemurs left. Natural vegetation has been degraded extensively in the u. s. Upstream biological legacies: genetic isolation (what is not upstream is now isolated from downstream); population-level changes: source of native species sink for nonnative species; ecosystem-level changes: primary production, nutrient cycling, decomposition.