Lenore Fahrig
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
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Lenore Fahrig is Chancellor’s Professor of Biology and co-director of the Geomatics and Landscape Ecology Research Laboratory at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Fahrig is a highly-cited researcher. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Guggenheim Fellow, and she is recipient of the Distinguished Landscape Ecologist Award from the North American Association for Landscape Ecology, the President’s Award from the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and the Herzberg Canada Gold Medal, Canada’s top award in Science and Engineering. For decades, Dr. Fahrig and her students have studied the responses of wildlife, including plants, arthropods, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, to human-altered landscapes. Her research combines simulation modelling with field data to evaluate the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation, road density, and the spatial configuration of farmlands and cities, on species distribution, abundance and diversity.
(Photo: BBVA Foundation)
Keynote:
How (not) to prioritize habitat for conservation
Our most effective means of protecting biodiversity is to protect the natural habitats on which species depend. Exactly which habitats to protect has been the subject of discussion and debate for decades. Two principles that have made their way into many conservation plans are: large areas are prioritized over small areas, and areas with low edge-to-area ratio are prioritized over more ‘edgy’ habitat areas. While these principles may be relevant at the scale of individual habitat patches, they do not translate, or scale-up, to a landscape scale. For a given total habitat area, landscapes containing many small patches of habitat do not harbour fewer species, or fewer threatened species, than landscapes containing few large patches. Local negative or positive responses to habitat edges do not indicate the same responses to edgy landscapes. Such extrapolations from local- or patch-scale patterns to landscape-scale patterns fail because they do not take into account landscape-scale processes. Global biodiversity protection will require protecting and restoring sufficient habitat in each of the world’s ecoregions. Applying patch size and edge density criteria to this effort constrains opportunities and hinders biodiversity protection.