Bronwyn Rayfield

The Anthropocene presents challenges for preserving and restoring ecosystems in human-altered landscapes. Policy development and landscape planning must consider long-term developments to maintain and restore functional ecosystems, ideally by using wildlife umbrella species as proxies. Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) aims to support both env...

Maintaining and restoring ecological connectivity will be key in helping to prevent and reverse the loss of biodiversity. Fortunately, a growing body of research conducted over the last few decades has advanced our understanding of connectivity science, which will help inform evidence‐based connectivity conservation actions. Increases in data avail...

Predicting the spread of populations across fragmented habitats is vital if we are to manage their persistence in the long term. We applied network theory with a model and an experiment to show that spread rate is jointly defined by the configuration of habitat networks (i.e., the arrangement and length of connections between habitat fragments) and...

Designing effective habitat and protected area networks, which sustain species-rich communities is a critical conservation challenge. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of new computational methods for analyzing and prioritizing the connectivity needs of multiple species. We argue that the goal of prioritizing habitat for multispecies conn...

Background Quantifying the carbon balance of forested ecosystems has been the subject of intense study involving the development of numerous methodological approaches. Forest inventories, processes-based biogeochemical models, and inversion methods have all been used to estimate the contribution of U.S. forests to the global terrestrial carbon sink...

Designing effective habitat and protected area networks, which sustain species-rich communities is a critical conservation challenge. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of new computational methods for analyzing and prioritizing the connectivity needs of multiple species. We argue that the goal of multispecies connectivity prioritizations...

Aim Non‐climatic constraints on species northern range boundaries are often overlooked in attempts to predict climate‐induced range shifts. Here, we examined the effects of habitat availability and fire disturbance on the distribution of a species that transitions from being common to being found only in marginal populations at the northern boundar...

Because of their ability to sequester carbon, tidal wetlands can serve as greenhouse gas (GHG) sinks. If managed properly, wetlands are a critical resource for climate adaptation and mitigation. The overall goal of this wetland assessment is to improve national capabilities to monitor and report on wetland change and effects on carbon sequestration...

The complexity of climate change impacts on ecological processes necessitates flexible and adaptive conservation strategies that cross traditional disciplines. Current strategies involving protected areas are predominantly fixed in space, and may on their own be inadequate under climate change. Here, we propose a novel approach to climate adaptatio...

At present, 10.5% of Canada’s land base is under some form of formal protection. Recent developments indicate Canada aims to work towards a target of protecting 17% of its terrestrial and inland water area by 2020. Canada is uniquely positioned globally as one of the few nations that has the capacity to expand the area under its protection. In addi...

Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) can have profound effects on terrestrial carbon dynamics, yet their effects on the global carbon budget remain uncertain. While land change impacts on ecosystem carbon dynamics have been the focus of numerous studies, few efforts have been based on observational data incorporating multiple ecosystem types s...

Sparsely settled forests (SSF) are poorly studied, coupled natural and human systems involving rural communities in forest ecosystems that are neither largely uninhabited wildland nor forests on the edges of urban areas. We developed and applied a multidisciplinary approach to define, map, and examine changes in the spatial extent and structure of...

Modularity limits disturbance effects The networks that form natural, social, and technological systems are vulnerable to the spreading impacts of perturbations. Theory predicts that networks with a clustered or modular structure—where nodes within a module interact more frequently than they do with nodes in other modules—might contain a perturbati...

Designing connected landscapes is among the most widespread strategies for achieving biodiversity conservation targets. The challenge lies in simultaneously satisfying the connectivity needs of multiple species at multiple spatial scales under uncertain climate and land-use change. To evaluate the contribution of remnant habitat fragments to the co...

Habitat loss fragments metacommunities, altering the movement of species between previously connected habitat patches. The consequences of habitat loss for ecosystem functioning depend, in part, on how these changes in connectivity alter the spatial insurance effects of biodiversity. Spatial insurance is the maintenance of biodiversity and stable e...

Ecological theory is essential to predict the effects of global changes such as habitat loss and fragmentation on biodiversity. The species-area relationship (SAR), metapopulation models (MEP) and species distribution models (SDM) are commonly used tools incorporating different ecological processes to explain biodiversity distribution and dynamics....

Recent studies have supported a link between phylogenetic diversity and various ecological properties including ecosystem function. However, such studies typically assume that phylogenetic branches of equivalent length are more or less interchangeable. Here we suggest that there is a need to consider not only branch lengths but also their placement...

To maximize specific ecosystem services (ES) such as food production, people alter landscape structure, i.e., the types of ecosystems present, their relative proportions, and their spatial arrangement across landscapes. This can have significant, and sometimes unexpected, effects on biodiversity and ES. Communities need information about how land-u...

Using a socioecological systems perspective, we advance a conceptual approach for characterizing tra- jectories of change in rural forest-based communities. We call attention to “communities in the middle,” communities positioned within forested regions representing neither unpopulated wilderness nor heavily urbanized or densely populated places on...

Biodiversity conservation in landscapes undergoing climate and land‐use changes requires designing multipurpose habitat networks that connect the movements of organisms at multiple spatial scales. Short‐range connectivity within habitat networks provides organisms access to spatially distributed resources, reduces local extinctions and increases re...

Definitions: Spatial insurance: Improvement of maintenance of species diversity and eco- system functioning in heterogeneous environments because species can track their optimal environments by dispersing between habitat patches. Betweenness centrality: Value of an individual habitat patch in adding to the connectivity of the metacommunity by being...

Background/Question/Methods Connectivity is an important characteristic in many systems, from landscapes to food webs. The more connected a systems is, the easier is the flow of individuals or biomass across the system. However, connectivity is a two-edged sword. When facing a perturbation, it spreads trough the very same routes that in normal co...

Landscape connectivity is considered a priority for ecosystem conservation because it may mitigate the synergistic effects of climate change and habitat loss. Climate change predictions suggest changes in precipitation regimes, which will affect the availability of water resources, with potential consequences for landscape connectivity. The Greater...

Measuring landscape connectivity in ways that reflect an animal's propensity or reluctance to move across a given landscape is key for planning effective conservation strategies. Resistance distance, based on circuit theory, is one such measure relevant for modeling how broad-scale animal movements over long time periods may lead to gene flow acros...

Connectivity models are useful tools that improve the ability of researchers and managers to plan land use for conservation and preservation. Most connectivity models function in a point-to-point or patch-to-patch fashion, limiting their use for assessing connectivity over very large areas. In large or highly fragmented systems, there may be so man...

Aim New conservation approaches that account for broad‐scale ecological processes must underpin decisions about conservation planning in the world's remaining wilderness areas. Our goal is to make the relevant tools and methods that have been developed by conservation scientists accessible to conservation practitioners working towards wilderness pr...

Background/Question/Methods The spatial insurance hypothesis demonstrated how dispersal between metacommunity patches can increase ecosystem productivity and stability in changing environments. Dispersal of organisms between local patches that experience asynchronous environmental change allows species to better track conditions to which they are...

A critical part of ecological studies is to quantify how landscape spatial heterogeneity affects species’ distributions. With advancements in remote sensing technology and GIS, we now live in a data-rich era allowing us to investigate species–environment relationships in heterogeneous landscapes at multiple spatial scales. However, the degree and t...

We present two approaches to predict movement of surface waters through heterogeneous terrain: least-cost graphs and circuits. These methods were compared with the commonly applied ‘deterministic eight’ (D8) approach by examining distances from extracted drainage networks to known-flow boundaries. Overlap statistics and classification accuracy esti...

Background/Question/Methods Maintaining connectivity among habitat patches is critical for biodiversity in fragmented landscapes. To guide the management and design of fragmented landscapes, ecological research must resolve the question of how altering habitat connectivity affects the dynamics and synchrony of populations. We examined the role of...

Graph theory, network theory, and circuit theory are increasingly being used to quantify multiple aspects of habitat connectivity and protected areas. There has been an explosive proliferation of network (connectivity) measures, resulting in over 60 measures for ecologists to now choose from. Conceptual clarification on the ecological meaning of th...

Habitat transformation is one of the leading causes of changes in biodiversity and the breakdown of ecosystem function and services. The impacts of habitat transformation on biodiversity are complex and can be difficult to test and demonstrate. Network approaches to biodiversity science have provided a powerful set of tools and models that are begi...

Appendix 1. Interaction plots for the fragmentation of habitat (H_FRAG) versus the set of relative cost values (C1–C8) plotted separately at each percentage of hospitable matrix (HM_COV; a–e). Mean values of the total spatial deviation of least-cost links is plotted for each of the cost sets at each level of H_FRAG

Maintaining and restoring connectivity among high-quality habitat patches is recognized as an important goal for the conservation of animal populations. To provide an efficient measure of potential connectivity pathways in heterogeneous landscapes, least-cost route analysis has been combined with graph-theoretical techniques. In this study we use s...

The persistence of species in reserves depends in large part on the persistence of functional ecological interactions. Despite their importance, however, ecological interactions have not yet been explicitly incorporated into conservation prioritization methods. We develop here a general method for incorporating consumer–resource interactions into s...

Assessing the community-level consequences of ecological restoration treatments is essential to guide future restoration efforts. We compared the vegetation composition and species richness of restored sites that received a range of restoration treatments and those of unrestored sites that experienced varying levels of disturbance. Our study was co...

Our objective was to reexamine the definition and use of surrogates in biodiversity studies of disturbed ecological communities. To this end, we examined diversity and community structure in recovering (pollution damaged) and restored (via liming, fertilizing, seeding, and planting) forests in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence zone near Sudbury, Ontario...

Management decisions regarding conservation reserve design are dependent on our ability characterize landscape spatial heterogeneity and its effects on species biodiversity and persistence. Understanding species' spatial habitat requirements in fragmented forested landscapes can increase our ability to maintain species biodiversity at the landscape...