2023 Honorable Mention for Best Paper in Landscape Ecology Award
Dr. Federico Riva
Dr. Federico Riva and Prof. Lenore Fahrig
The North American Regional Chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology has selected the paper by Dr. Federico Riva and Prof. Lenore Fahrig, published in the journal Ecology Letters as the recipient of the 2023 Honorable Mention for Best Paper in Landscape Ecology Award. The award was received at the IALE-NA annual meeting in Riverside, California, March 19-23rd. Members of IALE-NA are encouraged to nominate candidate papers on the topic of landscape ecology (published in any journal), and the Awards Committee selects the winners.
The Riva and Fahrig paper (“Landscape-scale habitat fragmentation is positivity related to biodiversity, despite patch-scale ecosystem decay”) re-examines the original data used by Chase et al., (2020, Nature 584, 238–243), which concluded that small patches suffer from “ecosystem decay”, i.e., smaller populations and lower biodiversity. However, Riva and Fahrig determined that, cumulatively, small patches contribute disproportionately more to biodiversity conservation at the landscape scale. The Riva and Fahrig paper illustrates how cross-scale extrapolation of results obtained from patch-scale studies to infer landscape-scale patterns can be problematic and demonstrates that small habitat patches should be considered more explicitly in conservation policy and practice. Dr. Riva notes: “Our analysis suggests that to maximize for biodiversity, one should strive to protect as much natural habitat as possible, even it if occurs in small patches” and “while large patches play an important role in conservation, the assumptions that some patches are too small to aid in biodiversity protection has been a deadly sin of modern conservation.”
Dr. Federico Riva was a Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Lenore Fahrig’s Geomatics and Landscape Ecology Research Laboratory (GLEL) at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He is now joining the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as an assistant professor.
Full reference:
Riva, F., & Fahrig, L. (2023). Landscape-scale habitat fragmentation is positively related to biodiversity, despite patch-scale ecosystem decay. Ecology Letters, 26(2), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14145
The North American Regional Chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology has selected the paper by Dr. Federico Riva and Prof. Lenore Fahrig, published in the journal Ecology Letters as the recipient of the 2023 Honorable Mention for Best Paper in Landscape Ecology Award. The award was received at the IALE-NA annual meeting in Riverside, California, March 19-23rd. Members of IALE-NA are encouraged to nominate candidate papers on the topic of landscape ecology (published in any journal), and the Awards Committee selects the winners.
The Riva and Fahrig paper (“Landscape-scale habitat fragmentation is positivity related to biodiversity, despite patch-scale ecosystem decay”) re-examines the original data used by Chase et al., (2020, Nature 584, 238–243), which concluded that small patches suffer from “ecosystem decay”, i.e., smaller populations and lower biodiversity. However, Riva and Fahrig determined that, cumulatively, small patches contribute disproportionately more to biodiversity conservation at the landscape scale. The Riva and Fahrig paper illustrates how cross-scale extrapolation of results obtained from patch-scale studies to infer landscape-scale patterns can be problematic and demonstrates that small habitat patches should be considered more explicitly in conservation policy and practice. Dr. Riva notes: “Our analysis suggests that to maximize for biodiversity, one should strive to protect as much natural habitat as possible, even it if occurs in small patches” and “while large patches play an important role in conservation, the assumptions that some patches are too small to aid in biodiversity protection has been a deadly sin of modern conservation.”
Dr. Federico Riva was a Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Lenore Fahrig’s Geomatics and Landscape Ecology Research Laboratory (GLEL) at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He is now joining the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as an assistant professor.
Full reference:
Riva, F., & Fahrig, L. (2023). Landscape-scale habitat fragmentation is positively related to biodiversity, despite patch-scale ecosystem decay. Ecology Letters, 26(2), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14145