Adverse Impacts of Landscape Fragmentation on Biodiversity :: Environmental Ecosystems Essays

Adverse Impacts of Landscape Fragmentation on BiodiversityLandscape atomisation can impose devastating and irreversible consequences on the biodiversity of ecosystems. Because of the conflicting interests amongst ecology and human economic benefit, it has become increasingly historic to recollect solutions for a harmonic balance. It is imperative for people to recognize the impacts of biodiversity sack and increase extinction of many species. These impacts must be understood in clubhouse to protect embellishs and the immense biodiversity they contain. Raising environmental consciousness through direction and public cooperative efforts, as well as promoting resource preservation and changing consumptive patterns, are just a few ship canal that we can begin to protect biodiversity.What is landscape fragmentation?Landscape fragmentation can be characterized as a break up of a continuous landscape into more smaller, less-connected patches by roads, clearing for agriculture, commercial and residential development, and timber harvesting. Clear-cutting can break up mature, contiguous forest until the searching area has re componentrated to a point that it does not act as an bionomical barrier to interior species or species that rely on continuous, mature forests. often of the work that has sought to measure landscape pattern and habitat fragmentation comes out of the disciplines of conservation biology and landscape ecology (Theobald 1998). These disciplines are founded on the premise that landscape patterns strongly influence and are influenced by ecologic processes (Forman and Godron 1986).How does landscape fragmentation affect species diversity?Landscape fragmentation contributes to deprivation of migratory corridors, loss of connectivity and infixed communities, which all lead to a loss of biodiversity for a region. Conservation of biodiversity must include all levels of diversity genetic, species, community, and landscape (CNHP 1995). Each complex level is dependent upon and linked to the other levels. In addition, humans are linked to all levels of this hierarchy. A healthy natural and human environment go hand in hand (CNHP 1995). An important step in conservation planning, in order to guarantee both(prenominal) a healthy natural environment as well as a healthy human environment, is recognizing the most endangered elements. Biodiversity is influenced by landscape fragmentation at various scales of space and time. The extinction of ecosystem types and component species whitethorn cause an increased patchiness of the landscape, resulting in lower population sizes and decreased connectivity. As a result, inhabitants may experience decreased dispersal abilities and lowered gene flows between populations.