habitat fragmentation
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Introduction
"Humans activities, such as clearing or cutting of forests and or the expansion of
agricultural land for urbanization has fragmented the landscapes" explains Bender.
For many organisms, the new habitat is an extreme environmental change or an
unprotective environment. In the past 15 years or so there has been concentrated interest
in modeling the activity of populations in fragmented landscapes so they can better
understand how these patterns affect the population process. The models have recently
been applied to conservation strategies to find the effect of the habitat fragmentation on
resident populations. Habitat Fragmentation is defined as an event that creates a greater
number of habitats, environmental change and smaller in size than the original habitat.
Bender points out that "The term also is used commonly to describe human behavior that
destroys habitats. The usage of this term can be misleading because of situations that
habitats can be removed from its environment without any fragmentation to the
landscape. The effect of displacing habitat can lose some habitat in the process, in which
populations decline." (Bender 1998)
"The reduction in average patch size, area altered, is the biggest effect of habitat
destruction. The effects of the patch size are easily detected in these fragmented
landscapes" explained Bender...