ABOUT BIOGEOGRAPHY
Biogeography, the study of distributions of species, is a fundamental discipline for understanding the past and forecasting the future for wild populations.
Conservation Biogeography combines the tools used in biogeographical studies, from genes to landscapes at large spatial and temporal scales, to study the factors that influence the distributions of biodiversity, and to provide insight into the complex dynamics shaping biodiversity to inform policy, predict future change, and apply knowledge to adress pressing conservation problems.
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Landscapes may undergo natural processes that fragment habitat and populations. However, the fragmentation of remaining isolated habitat in our time is a major concern for the long-term conservation of biodiversity and ecological and ecosytem processes.
Understanding and incorporating biogeographic perspectives in management, urban planning and design, and for conservation applications, is crucial as part of mitigation strategies and climate change adaptation. |
WHY STUDY BIOGEOGRAPHY?
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Understanding the ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary potential of species is crucial to better predict the future impact of disturbances on populations from climate change, non-native taxa, landscape alteration and changes to ecosystem dynamics and functions.
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Biogeography has important linkages to other disciplines, from population genetics to the study of behaviour including migration and breeding, and from biochemistry to earth sciences.
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Biogeography is at the core of important applications in ecosystem monitoring and management to guide policy-development, and even in health surveillance and epidemiology (as pathogens expand their distributions via animal vectors or other dispersal mechanisms).
Incorporating biogeographic perspectives can help us address critical questions:
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Do our current protected area networks provide sufficient connectivity for species?
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As distributions shift with climate change, what new migration patterns might be established and where is the optimal habitat predicted to be?
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From an evolutionary prespective, have host and pathogen species come in contact previously?
- What landscape features are important for facilitating or disrupting long-term dispersal, evolutionary processes, metapopulation dynamics and ecological interactions (species and their pollinators, predators and their prey, etc.)?
- What can patterns of molecular evolution, behaviour, morphology and lineages through space tell us about the resilience of species, adaptive potential and survival through periods of global change?
- What complementary new technologies can we use to study adaptation (e.g. genetics and genomics), track habitat change (e.g. GIS, monitoring), detect infrasound sources used by species for navigation or sources of undesirable noise for species, and learn about cryptic species (data loggers, analyses of stable isotope signatures, etc.)?
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