LSA is the place for foundational knowledge where creative thinkers engage with a complex, diverse, and changing world. We need your support to fuel our innovative environment, invest in the brightest people, and advance tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB)
- Slide 0
- Slide 1
- Slide 2
- Slide 3
- Slide 4
Recent news
Meet our new PhDs!
We asked some of our PhD students who just defended to share their experiences in EEB, tell us about the path that brought them here, and offer their wisdom to the incoming cohort.
U-M Research Team Recaptures Songbird Sensors to Unlock Migration Mysteries
Researchers at the University of Michigan Biological Station deploy and successfully recapture lightweight geolocators on a suite of migratory songbirds that breed in the boreal forests of northern Michigan.
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.
