Global-scale patterns of forest fragmentation

By Kurt H. Riitters, James D. Wickham, R. O'Neill, Bruce Jones, Elizabeth R. Smith. 2000

490 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report an analysis of forest fragmentation based on 1-km resolution land-cover maps for the globe. Measurements in analysis windows from 81 km 2 (9 x 9 pixels, “small” scale) to 59,049 km 2 (243 x 243 pixels, “large” scale) were used to characterize the fragmentation around each forested pixel. We identified six categories of fragmentation (interior, perforated, edge, transitional, patch, and undetermined) from the amount of forest and its occurrence as adjacent forest pixels. Interior forest exists only at relatively small scales; at larger scales, forests are dominated by edge and patch conditions. At the smallest scale, there were significant differences in fragmentation among continents; within continents, there were significant differences among individual forest types. Tropical rain forest fragmentation was most severe in North America and least severe in Europe–Asia. Forest types with a high percentage of perforated conditions were mainly in North America (five types) and Europe–Asia (four types), in both temperate and subtropical regions. Transitional and patch conditions were most common in 11 forest types, of which only a few would be considered as “naturally patchy” (e.g., dry woodland). The five forest types with the highest percentage of interior conditions were in North America; in decreasing order, they were cool rain forest, coniferous, conifer boreal, cool mixed, and cool broadleaf.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/635daf499f159fc9d1aa87c958063208e765558f

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Citations in the corpus

Neutral model analysis of landscape patterns from mathematical morphology (2007, unknown): “demonstrated that the approach is superior to image convolution for identifying ‘perforated’ and ‘edge’ conditions (Riitters et al. 2000).”
Behavior of class-level landscape metrics across gradients of class aggregation and area (2004, background): “Arguably the major application of landscape structure metrics has been assessing effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on landscape connectivity e.g., Fahrig and Merriam 1985; With et al. 1997; Fahrig 1998; Fahrig and Jonsen 1998; Wickham et al. 1999; Riitters et al. 2000 .”
Mapping Spatial Patterns with Morphological Image Processing (2007, methodology): “However, this approach often misclassifies fragmentation (see Riitters et al. 2000) because: (1) it is based partly on percolation theory, which applies strictly to random forest maps, and real landscapes are not random; (2) the fragmentation index is a categorical delineation of the continuous…”
Distribution and Causes of Global Forest Fragmentation (2003, methodology): “Riitters et al. (2000) quantified total forest fragmentation across multiple evaluation scales but did not identify human-caused fragmentation.”
Ecological Flexibility in Boutourlini’s Blue Monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis boutourlinii) in Jibat Forest, Ethiopia: A Comparison of Habitat Use, Ranging Behavior, and Diet in Intact and Fragmented Forest (2013, background): “…Ethiopia A. Mekonnen : A. Atickem Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Blindern, 0316 Oslo, Norway Group’s diet (N=2903 feeding records), with shoots (29.8 %), young leaves (17.1 %), animal prey (13.1 %), seeds (9.6 %), and flowers (6.8”