Identification of metacommunities in bioregions with historical habitat networks.

Although metacommunity theory provides many useful insights for conservation planning, the transfer of this knowledge to practice is hampered due to the difficulty of identifying metacommunities in bioregions. This study aims to identify the spatial extent of metacommunities at bioregional scales using current and historical habitat data, especially because contemporary biodiversity patterns may be a result of time-lagged responses to historical habitat configurations. Further, this estimation of the metacommunity spatial extent is based on both the habitat structure and the dispersal ability of the species.

A global time series of traffic volumes on extra-urban roads.

Traffic on roads outside of urban areas (i.e. extra-urban roads) can have major ecological and environmental impacts on agricultural, forested, and natural areas.

Sensitivity of habitat network models to changes in maximum dispersal distance.

Predicting the presence or absence (occurrence-state) of species in a certain area is highly important for conservation. Occurrence-state can be assessed by network models that take suitable habitat patches as nodes, connected by potential dispersal of species. To determine connections, a connectivity threshold is set at the species' maximum dispersal distance.

Settlement relationships and their morphological homogeneity across time and scale.

Homogeneous settlement morphologies negatively impact urban vibrancy, the environment, and emotions. Mainly resulting from the separation of functions such as work and living, homogeneous settlements have often been found around large cities. However, it remains unknown whether this phenomenon occurs in settlements of any size and persisted over time.

Assessing the influence of the amount of reachable habitat on genetic structure using landscape and genetic graphs.

Genetic structure, i.e. intra-population genetic diversity and inter-population genetic differentiation, is influenced by the amount and spatial configuration of habitat.