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- Info
Forest island dynamics in man-dominated landscapes
| Author: |
Burgess, Robert L.; Sharpe, David M., eds. |
| Date: |
1981 |
| Periodical: |
New York, NY: Springer-Verlag |
| Abstract: |
Forest patches (or islands) exist today in most of the eastern United States embedded in a matrix of nonforest cover types or land use categories. The original forest has given way to continually increasing demands of agriculture, industry, and urbanization. Dam and reservoir construction, demands for energy production facilities, including pipeline and transmission corridors, a massive interstate highway system, and recent escalations in coal mining have all served to further subdivide and encroach upon existing forested lands. MacArthur and Wilsonâs theory of island biogeography (1967) stimulated thinking and a great deal of research concerning the potential application to the dynamics of forest islands riding, as it were, in a âseaâ of nonforest landscape. Questions of migration and extinction, succession rates and processes, species diversity, and optimal size of terrestrial nature preserves were beginning to be asked. Research was initiated to test hypotheses of island biogeographic theory, and evidence began to accumulate, particularly for plants and birds, that biologic processes operative within and between forest patches show both similarities and differences when compared to the dynamics of populations interacting on islands. Consequently, a symposium was organized by the Ecological Society of America, meeting at Michigan State University in August 1977 with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), to address this array of concerns. The present volume has its roots in that symposium. The chapters, however, are current and several additions have been made to broaden and deepen the concepts and examples portrayed in the text. |
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