Vander Putten et al. 2023. Varying size of forest fragments contain different wildlife community compositions
By Maura Vander Putten, Jaclyn Feehan, Oliva Devito, Julia Marsala
Abstract
Global decrease in biodiversity weakens ecosystems’ abilities to endure anthropogenic damage such as forest fragmentation. Forest fragmentation is becoming a larger threat to biodiversity as human populations grow and the need to appropriate land for human use increases. According to the species-area concept, area and biodiversity are positively correlated, meaning that when forests become fragmented and create two smaller forests, their biodiversity will decrease. We studied the wildlife biodiversity of various sizes of fragmented forests at Purchase College using trail cams and discovered that the area of a forest affects the types of species that inhabit it, but not necessarily its wildlife biodiversity. Smaller species tend to inhabit smaller forests and larger species tend to inhabit larger forests. Our results also suggest that wildlife biodiversity in small forests can be aided by its proximity to other ecosystems as the 20.84 hectare forest had more biodiversity than a 92.58 hectare forest that was only separated by a road and a 3.02 hectare forest isolated by a dense urban landscape had significantly lower wildlife biodiversity than any others. This information can be used to improve our understanding of anthropogenic influences on biodiversity and could give way to more effective approaches to forest and wildlife conservation.