Eric M. Wood

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• PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Professor (Associate) at California State University Los Angeles

Street trees are public resources planted in a municipality’s right‐of‐way and are a considerable component of urban forests throughout the world. Street trees provide numerous benefits to people. However, many metropolitan areas have a poor understanding of the value of street trees to wildlife, which presents a gap in our knowledge of conservatio...

Urban parks provide amenities that support both human and animal communities. However, parks are often unevenly distributed within cities. One metric used to assess the distribution of parks to the public is termed the Park Score. The Park Score is an approach to measure access, acreage, investment, and amenities, and is designed to understand a ci...

Residential yards are a form of urban land use that cover a considerable amount of area in cities worldwide and provide important habitat for wildlife, especially when landscaped with native plants. Nevertheless, most native‐plant landscaping and wildlife research in the northern temperate regions of the world has been conducted during the spring a...

The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) was a U.S. government-sponsored program initiated in the 1930s to evaluate mortgage lending risk. The program resulted in hand-drawn "security risk" maps intended to grade sections of cities where investment should be focused (greenlined areas) or limited (redlined zones). The security maps have since been w...

Urban ecosystems are dominated by private lands which poses a significant hurdle to performing field-based assessment of wildlife. An alternative approach is to characterize indices of animal habitat in difficult-to-access areas using data from airborne remote sensing platforms. Characterizing indices of wildlife habitat using remotely sensed data...

Birds select habitat characteristics, such as variability in habitat structure, across multiple spatial scales (grain and extent). Measuring habitat variability at multiple scales can better capture factors that influence avifauna communities than focusing on one scale only. One valuable tool in assessing habitat heterogeneity is the cumulative dyn...

Urbanization is a significant pressure affecting wildlife and has the potential to greatly alter behavioral responses in animal communities. A behavioral response that is potentially affected by urbanization is the mobbing of predators by potential avian prey species. We tested three hypotheses concerning the effects of various abiotic and biotic f...

Secondary metabolites often function as antipredator defenses, but when bioactive at low concentrations, their off-target effects on other organisms may be overlooked. Candidate “keystone molecules” are proposed to affect community structure and ecosystem functions, generally originating as defenses of primary producers; the broader effects of anim...

Our world is becoming increasingly urbanized with a growing human population concentrated around cities. The expansion of urban areas has important consequences for biodiversity, yet the abiotic drivers of biodiversity in urban ecosystems have not been well characterized for the most diverse group of animals on the planet, arthropods. Given their g...

As projects emerge to protect, restore, and enhance natural landscape in the Los Angeles region, attention turns to the historical landscape for understanding, inspiration, and context. Descriptions of the historical landscape patterns and function have led to a conclusion that this landscape and region cannot be understood without listening to the...

Species sensitivity to forest fragmentation varies latitudinally, peaking in the tropics. A prominent explanation for this pattern is that historical landscape disturbance at higher latitudes has removed fragmentation-sensitive species or promoted the evolution of more resilient survivors. However, it is unclear whether this so-called extinction fi...

Giant reed ( Arundo donax ) is a prevalent invasive plant in desert riparian ecosystems that threatens wildlife habitat. From 2008 to 2018, under a United States–Mexico partnership, prescribed burns and herbicide applications were used to remove giant reed and promote native revegetation along the Rio Grande—Río Bravo floodplain in west Texas, USA,...

Residential yards are a form of urban land use that cover a considerable amount of area in cities worldwide and provide important habitat for wildlife, especially when landscaped with native plants. Nevertheless, most native-plant landscaping and wildlife research in the northern temperate regions of the world has been conducted during the spring a...

Urbanization is a strong driver of plant diversity and may have complex effects on developed ecosystems. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether urban environments increase or decrease plant biodiversity compared with rural environments. Further, it is also unclear how non-native plant species contribute to spatial diversity patterns and ecosystem...

Urban landscaping conversions can alter decomposition processes and soil respiration, making it difficult to forecast regional CO2 emissions. Here we explore rates of initial mass loss and net nitrogen (N) mineralization in natural and four common urban land covers (waterwise, waterwise with mulch, shrub, and lawn) from sites across seven colleges...

Tropical forests are among the most biodiverse biomes on the planet. Nevertheless, quantifying the abundance and species richness within megadiverse groups is a significant challenge. We designed a study to address this challenge by documenting the variability of the insect fauna across a vertical canopy gradient in a Central Amazonian tropical for...

Urbanization is a major driver of global species loss. While cities with suitable habitats and conservation policies may support locally-high biodiversity levels, we suspected that the complexity of managing very large cities might counteract the advantage of large geographic area, and these cities may be less effective at biodiversity conservation...

The niche-based argument that species are filtered from environments in which they cannot sustain viable populations is the basis of the Richness-Heterogeneity Relationship (RHR). However, the multi-dimensionality of niches suggests that the RHR may take different shapes along different environmental axes, with potential confounding effects if filt...

During the worldwide shutdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many reports emerged of urban wildlife sightings. While these images garnered public interest and declarations of wildlife reclaiming cities, it is unclear whether wildlife truly reoccupied urban areas or whether there were simply increased detections of urban wildlife during this...

Decades of research suggest that species richness depends on spatial characteristics of habitat patches, especially their size and isolation. In contrast, the habitat amount hypothesis predicts that (1) species richness in plots of fixed size (species density) is more strongly and positively related to the amount of habitat around the plot than to...

Vulnerability to habitat fragmentation Habitat fragmentation caused by human activities has consequences for the distribution and movement of organisms. Betts et al. present a global analysis of how exposure to habitat fragmentation affects the composition of ecological communities (see the Perspective by Hargreaves). In a dataset consisting of 448...

The Golden-winged Warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera) is an imperiled songbird that breeds in early-successional plant communities of eastern North America. Conservation efforts on the breeding grounds have become a priority because population declines are thought to be driven, in part, by the loss of breeding habitat. Although the species is known to...

Well-known for its high elevation areas, Kinabalu National Park in Sabah, Malaysia, also protects lowland areas that have received little ornithological attention. Here we describe the avian community at Serinsim Substation, an area of mixed lowland rainforest habitats within the park. We present observations from Serinsim, including an annotated l...

Forest edges influence more than half of the world's forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. Here we assembled a global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a statistical approach for quantif...

Conventional surveys designed to monitor common and widespread species may fail to adequately track population changes of rare or patchily distributed species that are often of high conservation concern. We evaluated the performance of a new monitoring approach that employs both a spatially balanced sampling design and a targeted survey protocol de...

Anthropogenic changes to the landscape and climate cause novel ecological and evolutionary pressures, leading to potentially dramatic changes in the distribution of biodiversity. Warm winter temperatures can shift species’ distributions to regions thatwere previously uninhabitable. Further, urbanization and supplementary feeding may facilitate rang...

In 2010, land trusts in the U.S. had protected nearly 50 million acres of land, with much of it providing habitat for wildlife. However, the extent to which land trusts explicitly focus on wildlife conservation remains largely unknown. We used content analysis to assess land trust involvement in wildlife and habitat conservation, as reflected in th...

Hybridization or the interbreeding of genetically discrete populations or species can occur where ranges of genetically distinct units overlap. Golden-winged Warblers (Vermivora chrysoptera), a species that has been in steady decline for decades, highlight the potential population-level consequences of hybridization. A major factor implicated in th...

Extreme weather is becoming more pronounced, making phenological patterns less predictable. Among the potential consequences, extreme weather may alter relationships of migratory birds with their seasonal food resources and thus impact valuable ecosystem regulating services (e.g., bird predation of herbivorous insects). Our goal was to quantify the...

1. Biodiversity conservation is a primary function of protected areas. However, protected areas also attract people, and therefore, land use has intensified at the boundaries of these lands globally. In the USA, since the 1970s, housing growth at the boundaries (<1 km) of protected areas has increased at a rate far higher than on more distant priva...

Pidgeon. 2015. Climatic extremes influence spring tree phenology and migratory songbird foraging behavior. Pp. 117–131 in E. M. Wood and J. L. Kellermann (editors), Phenological synchrony and bird migration: changing climate and seasonal resources in North America. Studies in Avian Biology (no. 47), CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. Abstract. In the Upper...

As people encroach increasingly on natural areas, one question is how this affects avian biodiversity. The answer to this is partly scale-dependent. At broad scales, human populations and biodiversity concentrate in the same areas and are positively associated, but at local scales people and biodiversity are negatively associated with biodiversity....

Himalayan forests are undergoing rapid changes due to population growth and economic development and their associated bird communities are among the most threatened and least-studied on earth. In the Chinese Himalaya, traditionally managed Tibetan sacred forests are keystone structures for forest bird conservation. Yet, it remains unclear which fin...

Protected areas are a cornerstone for biodiversity, but they also provide amenities that attract housing development on inholdings and adjacent private lands. We explored how this development affects biodiversity within and near protected areas among six ecological regions throughout the United States. We quantified the effect of housing density wi...

Habitat fragmentation studies have produced complex results that are challenging to synthesize. Inconsistencies among studies may result from variation in the choice of landscape metrics and response variables, which is often compounded by a lack of key statistical or methodological information. Collating primary datasets on biodiversity responses...

The positive monotonic relationship between habitat heterogeneity and species richness is a cornerstone of ecology. Recently, it was suggested that this relationship should be unimodal rather than monotonic due to a tradeoff between environmental heterogeneity and population sizes, which increases local species extinctions at high heterogeneity lev...

California oak savanna is a habitat of sparse tree canopy that extends from northern Baja California to southern British Columbia and is under threat from land-use pressures such as conversion to agriculture, overgrazing, urban development, and fire suppression. Bird-conservation plans have been drafted for the region's oak woodlands. Yet it is unc...

Identifying and protecting "keystone structures" is essential to maintain biodiversity in an increasingly human-dominated world. Sacred forests, i.e. natural areas protected by local people for cultural or religious regions, may be keystone structures for forest birds in the Greater Himalayas, but there is limited understanding of their use by bird...

For decades, ecologists have measured habitat attributes in the field to understand and predict patterns of animal distribution and abundance. However, the scale of inference possible from field measured data is typically limited because large-scale data collection is rarely feasible. This is problematic given that conservation and management typic...

First country record for Woolly-necked Stork in China

Landscape pattern metrics are widely used for predicting habitat and species diversity. However, the relationship between landscape pattern and species diversity is typically measured at a single spatial scale, even though both landscape pattern, and species occurrence and community composition are scale-dependent. While the eff ects of scale on la...

Ecologists commonly collect data on vegetation structure, which is an important attribute for characterizing habitat. However, measuring vegetation structure across large areas is logistically difficult. Our goal was to evaluate the degree to which sample-point pixel values and image texture of remotely sensed data are associated with vegetation st...

The relevé method, a standardized, floristically based vegetation sampling technique developed in Europe, has become a vegetation measurement method used worldwide. Although the relevé method was developed by plant ecologists to classify vegetation, ornithologists have begun to use the method for bird-habitat studies, sometimes including modificati...