Urbanization is the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It can also mean population growth in urban areas instead of rural ones. It is predominantly the process by which towns and cities are formed and become larger as more people begin living and working in central areas.
Ex situ conservation literally means, "off-site conservation". It is the process of protecting an endangered species, variety or breed, of plant or animal outside its natural habitat; for example, by removing part of the population from a threatened habitat and placing it in a new location, an artificial environment which is similar to the natural habitat of the respective animal and within the care of humans, example are zoological parks and wildlife sanctuaries. The degree to which humans control or modify the natural dynamics of the managed population varies widely, and this may include alteration of living environments, reproductive patterns, access to resources, and protection from predation and mortality. Ex situ management can occur within or outside a species' natural geographic range. Individuals maintained ex situ exist outside an ecological niche. This means that they are not under the same selection pressures as wild populations, and they may undergo artificial selection if maintained ex situ for multiple generations.
The Torresian crow, also called the Australian crow or Papuan crow, is a passerine bird in the crow family native to the north and west of Australia and nearby islands in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The species has a black plumage, beak and mouth with white irises. The base of the feathers on the head and neck are white. The Torresian crow is slightly larger with a more robust bill than the morphologically similar little crow.
A wildlife garden is an environment created with the purpose to serve as a sustainable haven for surrounding wildlife. Wildlife gardens contain a variety of habitats that cater to native and local plants, birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects, mammals and so on, and are meant to sustain locally native flora and fauna. Other names this type of gardening goes by can vary, prominent ones being habitat, ecology, and conservation gardening.
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 northern mockingbird is a mockingbird commonly found in North America. This bird is mainly a permanent resident, but northern birds may move south during harsh weather. This species has rarely been observed in Europe. This species was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae as Turdus polyglottos. The northern mockingbird is known for its mimicking ability, as reflected by the meaning of its scientific name, "many-tongued mimic". The northern mockingbird has gray to brown upper feathers and a paler belly. Its tail and wings have white patches which are visible in flight.
The noisy miner is a bird in the honeyeater family, Meliphagidae, and is endemic to eastern and southeastern Australia. This miner is a grey bird, with a black head, orange-yellow beak and feet, a distinctive yellow patch behind the eye, and white tips on the tail feathers. The Tasmanian race has a more intense yellow panel in the wing, and a broader white tip to the tail. Males, females and juveniles are similar in appearance, though young birds are a brownish-grey. As the common name suggests, the noisy miner is a vocal species with a large range of songs, calls, scoldings and alarms, and almost constant vocalisations, particularly from young birds. One of four species in the genus Manorina, the noisy miner itself is divided into four subspecies. The separation of the Tasmanian M. m. leachi is of long standing, and the mainland birds were further split in 1999.
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.
The flight zone of an animal is the area surrounding an animal that if encroached upon by a potential predator or threat, including humans, will cause alarm and escape behavior. The flight zone is determined by the animal's flight distance, sometimes called flight initiation distance (FID) which extends horizontally from the animal and sometimes vertically. It may also be termed escape distance, alert distance, flush distance, and escape flight distance.
The white-footed mouse is a rodent native to North America from Ontario, Quebec, Labrador, and the Maritime Provinces to the southwestern United States and Mexico. In the Maritimes, its only location is a disjunct population in southern Nova Scotia. It is also known as the woodmouse, particularly in Texas.
Intraspecific competition is an interaction in population ecology, whereby members of the same species compete for limited resources. This leads to a reduction in fitness for both individuals, but the more fit individual survives and is able to reproduce. By contrast, interspecific competition occurs when members of different species compete for a shared resource. Members of the same species have rather similar requirements for resources, whereas different species have a smaller contested resource overlap, resulting in intraspecific competition generally being a stronger force than interspecific competition.
The prohibition "do not feed the animals" reflects a policy forbidding the artificial feeding of wild or feral animals. Signs displaying this message are commonly found in zoos, circuses, animal theme parks, aquariums, national parks, parks, public spaces, farms, and other places where people come into contact with wildlife. In some cases there are laws to enforce such no-feeding policies.
Podarcis hispanicus, also known as Iberian wall lizard, is a small wall lizard species of the genus Podarcis. It is found in the Iberian peninsula, in northwestern Africa and in coastal districts in Languedoc-Roussillon in France. In Spanish, this lizard is commonly called lagartija Ibérica.
In ecology, urban ecosystems are considered a ecosystem functional group within the intensive land-use biome. They are structurally complex ecosystems with highly heterogeneous and dynamic spatial structure that is created and maintained by humans. They include cities, smaller settlements and industrial areas, that are made up of diverse patch types. Urban ecosystems rely on large subsidies of imported water, nutrients, food and other resources. Compared to other natural and artificial ecosystems human population density is high, and their interaction with the different patch types produces emergent properties and complex feedbacks among ecosystem components.
Urban wildlife is wildlife that can live or thrive in urban/suburban environments or around densely populated human settlements such as townships.
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.
Soundscape ecology is the study of the acoustic relationships between living organisms, human and other, and their environment, whether the organisms are marine or terrestrial. First appearing in the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology edited by Barry Truax, in 1978, the term has occasionally been used, sometimes interchangeably, with the term acoustic ecology. Soundscape ecologists also study the relationships between the three basic sources of sound that comprise the soundscape: those generated by organisms are referred to as the biophony; those from non-biological natural categories are classified as the geophony, and those produced by humans, the anthropophony.
Cat predation on wildlife is the result of the natural instincts and behavior of both feral and owned house cats to hunt small prey, including wildlife. Some people view this as a desirable phenomenon, such as in the case of barn cats and other cats kept for the intended purpose of pest control; but scientific evidence does not support the popular use of cats to control urban rat populations, and ecologists oppose their use for this purpose because of the disproportionate harm they do to beneficial native wildlife. As an invasive species and superpredator, they do considerable ecological damage.
Urban evolution refers to the heritable genetic changes of populations in response to urban development and anthropogenic activities in urban areas. Urban evolution can be caused by mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, or evolution by natural selection. Biologists have observed evolutionary change in numerous species compared to their rural counterparts on a relatively short timescale.
Madhusudan Katti is an Indian American environmental scientist who is an Associate Professor of Ecology at the North Carolina State University. His research studies the evolutionary ecology of vertebrate response to human modifications of habitats.
