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Habitat fragmentation is often a cause of species becoming threatened or endangered. [25] The existence of viable habitat is critical to the survival of any species, and in many cases, the fragmentation of any remaining habitat can lead to difficult decisions for conservation biologists.
This leads to a lack of a skill set for the animal to adjust and adapt to a new environment. Habitat fragmentation and loss lead to smaller habitat sizes, and ecosystem decay predicts ecological processes are changed so heavily in smaller habitats that the loss in diversity is more extreme than expected by fragmentation alone. [2]
Also called range fragmentation, disjunct distributions may be caused by changes in the environment, such as mountain building and continental drift or rising sea levels; it may also be due to an organism expanding its range into new areas, by such means as rafting, or other animals transporting an organism to a new location (plant seeds consumed by birds and animals can be moved to new ...
Habitat degradation, fragmentation, and pollution are aspects of habitat destruction caused by humans that do not necessarily involve over destruction of habitat, yet result in habitat collapse. Desertification , deforestation , and coral reef degradation are specific types of habitat destruction for those areas ( deserts , forests , coral reefs ).
Habitat fragmentation can be caused by roads. When humans start to cut down the trees for logging, secondary roads are created that will go unused after its primary use. Once abandoned, the plants of the rainforest will find it difficult to grow back in that area. [37] Forest fragmentation also opens the path for illegal hunting.
Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity. Urbanization is causing humans to continuously fragment landscapes and thus increase the edge effect.
Habitat conservation is a management practice that seeks to conserve, protect and restore habitats and prevent species extinction, fragmentation or reduction in range. [1] It is a priority of many groups that cannot be easily characterized in terms of any one ideology .
Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment [56] (suspected of being one of the major causes of speciation [56]), and human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment much faster and causes the extinction of many species. More specifically, habitat ...