Landscape ecology of lemurs in Madagascar

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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 (