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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB)
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Recent news
Let’s Talk Birds with Dr. Brett Benz
Dr. Brett Benz is the Collection Manager for Birds and an Assistant Research Scientist at U-M’s Museum of Zoology. He shares how he’s working to digitize our egg collection and also highlights a bird specimen – donated by P.T. Barnum!
Michigan News Spotlight: U-M museums’ insect, plant collections on display at Toledo Museum of Art
The Museum of Zoology and Herbarium contributed specimens to the Toledo Museum of Art for the Rachel Ruysch exhibit.
RESEARCH FEATURE
EEB Postdoctoral Fellow Thiago Gonçalves-Souza and department Chair Professor Nate Sanders just published an article in Nature titled "Species turnover does not rescue biodiversity in fragmented landscapes."
Abstract: Habitat fragmentation generally reduces biodiversity at the patch scale (α diversity)1. However, there is ongoing debate about whether such negative effects can be alleviated at the landscape scale (γ diversity) if among-patch diversity (β diversity) increases as a result of fragmentation2,3,4,5,6. This controversial view has not been rigorously tested. Here we use a dataset of 4,006 taxa across 37 studies from 6 continents to test the effects of fragmentation on biodiversity across scales by explicitly comparing continuous and fragmented landscapes. We find that fragmented landscapes consistently have both lower α diversity and lower γ diversity. Although fragmented landscapes did tend to have higher β diversity, this did not translate into higher γ diversity. Our findings refute claims that habitat fragmentation can increase biodiversity at landscape scales, and emphasize the need to restore habitat and increase connectivity to minimize biodiversity loss at ever-increasing scales.
Michigan News did an excellent write -up of the article: find it here.
