The moose or elk is the world's tallest, largest and heaviest extant species of deer and the only species in the genus Alces. It is also the tallest, and the second-largest, land animal in North America, falling short only of the American bison in body mass. Most adult male moose have broad, palmate antlers; other members of the deer family have pointed antlers with a dendritic ("twig-like") configuration. Moose inhabit the circumpolar boreal forests or temperate broadleaf and mixed forests of the Northern Hemisphere, thriving in cooler, temperate areas as well as subarctic climates.
In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats. Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.
A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance, a concept introduced in 1969 by the zoologist Robert T. Paine. Keystone species play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem and helping to determine the types and numbers of various other species in the community. Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. Some keystone species, such as the wolf, are also apex predators.
Roadkill is an animal or animals that have been struck and killed by drivers of motor vehicles. Wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) have increasingly been the topic of academic research to understand the causes, and how they can be mitigated.
Urban ecology is the scientific study of the relation of living organisms with each other and their surroundings in an urban environment. An urban environment refers to environments dominated by high-density residential and commercial buildings, paved surfaces, and other urban-related factors that create a unique landscape. The goal of urban ecology is to achieve a balance between human culture and the natural environment.
The mule deer is a deer indigenous to western North America; it is named for its ears, which are large like those of the mule. Two subspecies of mule deer are grouped into the black-tailed deer.
Wildlife crossings are structures that allow animals to cross human-made barriers safely. Wildlife crossings may include underpass tunnels or wildlife tunnels, viaducts, and overpasses or green bridges ; amphibian tunnels; fish ladders; canopy bridges ; tunnels and culverts ; and green roofs.
Habitat fragmentation describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat), causing population fragmentation and ecosystem decay. Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment, and human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment much faster and causes the extinction of many species. More specifically, habitat fragmentation is a process by which large and contiguous habitats get divided into smaller, isolated patches of habitats.
A culvert is a structure that channels water past an obstacle or to a subterranean waterway. Typically embedded so as to be surrounded by soil, a culvert may be made from a pipe, reinforced concrete or other material. In the United Kingdom, the word can also be used for a longer artificially buried watercourse.
Railroad ecology or railway ecology is a term used to refer to the study of the ecological community growing along railroad or railway tracks and the effects of railroads on natural ecosystems. Such ecosystems have been studied primarily in Europe. Similar conditions and effects appear also by roads used by vehicles. Railroads along with roads, canals, and power lines are examples of linear infrastructure intrusions.
In landscape ecology, landscape connectivity is, broadly, "the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes movement among resource patches". Alternatively, connectivity may be a continuous property of the landscape and independent of patches and paths. Connectivity includes both structural connectivity and functional connectivity. Functional connectivity includes actual connectivity and potential connectivity in which movement paths are estimated using the life-history data.
A wildlife corridor, habitat corridor, or green corridor is an area of habitat connecting wildlife populations separated by human activities or structures. This allows an exchange of individuals between populations, which may help prevent the negative effects of inbreeding and reduced genetic diversity that often occur within isolated populations. Corridors may also help facilitate the re-establishment of populations that have been reduced or eliminated due to random events. This may moderate some of the worst effects of habitat fragmentation, whereas urbanization can split up habitat areas, causing animals to lose both their natural habitat and the ability to move between regions to access resources. Habitat fragmentation due to human development is an ever-increasing threat to biodiversity, and habitat corridors serve to manage its effects.
Defaunation is the global, local, or functional extinction of animal populations or species from ecological communities. The growth of the human population, combined with advances in harvesting technologies, has led to more intense and efficient exploitation of the environment. This has resulted in the depletion of large vertebrates from ecological communities, creating what has been termed "empty forest". Defaunation differs from extinction; it includes both the disappearance of species and declines in abundance. Defaunation effects were first implied at the Symposium of Plant-Animal Interactions at the University of Campinas, Brazil in 1988 in the context of Neotropical forests. Since then, the term has gained broader usage in conservation biology as a global phenomenon.
Road ecology is the study of the ecological effects of roads and highways. These effects may include local effects, such as on noise, water pollution, habitat destruction/disturbance and local air quality; and the wider environmental effects of transport such as habitat fragmentation, ecosystem degradation, and climate change from vehicle emissions.
Cumulative effects, also referred to as cumulative environmental effects and cumulative impacts, can be defined as changes to the environment caused by the combined impact of past, present and future human activities and natural processes. Cumulative effects to the environment are the result of multiple activities whose individual direct impacts may be relatively minor but in combination with others result are significant environmental effects. The multiple impacts of different activities may have an additive, synergistic or antagonistic effect on one another and with natural processes. Cumulative effects can be difficult to predict and manage due to inadequate environmental baseline data, complex ecological processes, and the large scale at which human development occurs.
Linear infrastructure intrusions into natural ecosystems are man-made linear infrastructure such as roads and highways, electric power lines, railway lines, canals, pipelines, firebreaks, and fences. These intrusions cause linear opening through the habitat or breakage in landscape connectivity due to infrastructure creation and maintenance, which is known to have multiple ecological effects in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. These effects include habitat loss and fragmentation, spread of invasive alien species, desiccation, windthrow, fires, animal injury and mortality, changes in animal behaviour, pollution, microclimate and vegetation changes, loss of ecosystem services, increased pressures from development, tourism, hunting, garbage disposal, and associated human disturbances. These intrusions, considered crucial infrastructure for economic sectors such as transportation, power, and irrigation, may also have negative social impacts on indigenous and rural people through exposure to novel social and market pressures, loss of land and displacement, and iniquitous distribution of costs and benefits from infrastructure projects. The study of the ecological effects of linear infrastructure intrusions has spawning sub-fields of research such as road ecology and railroad ecology.
Landscape genetics is the scientific discipline that combines population genetics and landscape ecology. It broadly encompasses any study that analyses plant or animal population genetic data in conjunction with data on the landscape features and matrix quality where the sampled population lives. This allows for the analysis of microevolutionary processes affecting the species in light of landscape spatial patterns, providing a more realistic view of how populations interact with their environments. Landscape genetics attempts to determine which landscape features are barriers to dispersal and gene flow, how human-induced landscape changes affect the evolution of populations, the source-sink dynamics of a given population, and how diseases or invasive species spread across landscapes.
Many animal migration patterns are still intact in the greater Jackson area due to the large quantity of protected land. Large animals such as elk, mule deer, and pronghorn have separate winter and summer habitats and are moving in the spring and fall. Elk, moose, and other large animals also converge in the low-lying areas around Jackson during the winter months to escape deep snow at higher elevations. All of this movement increases the likelihood of wildlife-vehicle collisions on roads.
A roadkill hotspot or blackspot is an accumulation of roadkill along a given length of roadway with significantly more wildlife-vehicle collisions than expected to occur by chance, based on a normal distribution. Decision-makers can then authorize the construction of roadkill mitigation infrastructure based on roadkill hotspot locations, prioritizing those with the most roadkill in number or those for a particular target species for conservation. Roadkill hotspots vary spatially and temporally, depending on the scale, duration of monitoring, and both the species and season in question. They can be calculated using roadkill survey data; GPS coordinates of roadkill collected by researchers and highway maintenance personnel, or increasingly, civilian-reported data. Additionally, roadkill hotspots can be projected by using a model to ascertain probable locations; models typically use existing wildlife abundance, distribution, and mitigation data combined with landscape variables and climatic data. Models are often used to determine the probable roadkill locations of ecologically sensitive animals or during the planning stages of a new road, it is noted that these locations may not align perfectly with sites of highest animal crossing attempts. Many academics stress the combined value of animal abundance and migration data with roadkill hotspots as a more assured way to ascertain the best locations to construct roadkill mitigation structures.
Lenore Fahrig is a Chancellor's Professor in the biology department at Carleton University, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Fahrig studies effects of landscape structure—the arrangement of forests, wetlands, roads, cities, and farmland—on wildlife populations and biodiversity, and is best known for her work on habitat fragmentation. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
