| Content description: |
Due to climate change, the habitat of many plant and animal species is expected to change. This may result in shifts in geographical ranges of the species. For the persistence of the species concerned, it is vital that populations are able to track shifts in the location of suitable habitat, and thus that enough dispersers are produced and that these individuals are able to find and colonize new habitat from the current habitat, at a high enough speed. Maintaining a sufficiently high habitat connectivity in all stages of the transition from current to future habitat configurations, appears therefore vital. However, for species with different life-history characteristics, colonization capacities and minimum habitat area requirements, we have as yet no systematic insight into the amount of landscape connectivity required to allow tracking range shifts.
The project involves development and application of several (simple to complex) spatial explicit models of the process of (habitat) landscape change and the dynamics of a population tied to this habitat. Depending on the context (different research projects) focus may be on model development, -application or -analysis. |