Landscape ecology of lemurs in Madagascar

对生态学至关重要的一个问题是了解动植物群落如何应对森林砍伐过程(森林损失、森林碎片化和边缘效应)。在世界许多地区，森林正变得越来越支离破碎，这导致边缘生境在每个支离物中所占的比例更大。对于马达加斯加的狐猴来说，这些问题具有特别的生态利益和保护关注，因为人类已经将岛上的大部分原始森林变成了草原。尽管已经开发出概念模型来预测动物群落将如何因森林丧失和碎片化而变化，但很少有人对热带哺乳动物的相关假设进行经验测试，更不用说针对树栖灵长类动物，如狐猴。我和我的学生建议将我们的研究重点放在两种昼夜食果动物的景观生态(

A question of fundamental importance to ecology is understanding how plant and animal communities respond to deforestation processes (forest loss, forest fragmentation, and edge effects). Forests are becoming increasingly fragmented in many parts of the world, which result in edge habitats comprising a greater proportion of each fragment. For the lemurs of Madagascar, these issues are of particular ecological interest and conservation concern because humans have transformed most of the primary forests to grassland on the island. Although conceptual models have been developed to predict how animal communities will change due to forest loss and fragmentation, there are few empirical tests of the associated hypotheses on tropical mammals, let alone for arboreal primates, such as lemurs. My students and I propose to focus our research on the landscape ecology of two diurnal frugivores (