© PSG and PDC, 2005
Last
Update:
February 11, 2008
Chapter 8 - Studying animals and their distributions.
New books and papers | Websites
Chapter Outline :
- Variations in distribution can be seen as an interrelated set of long-, medium- and short-range factors;
- Short-range factors involve species and individuals and include ethology, adaptation, competition and food supply;
- Medium-range factors involve ecosystems and include environmental gradients, biotic dispersal and climate change;
- Long-range factors have a global focus and include time, geographical, geological and biological barriers;
- In mapping animals there are a number of problems to be faced including the mobility of the species and the theoretical paradigms used in the methods;
- An increasingly wide range of methods is used to sample animals for distribution study. These range from simple traps to satellite mapping;
- Studying individual
cases in distribution helps highlight both progress and problems
in the subject and is a vital part of the education in this field.
| Author(s) | Title (and link) | Comment |
| Morellet et al 2007 | Indicators of ecological change: new tools for managing populations of large herbivores | Describes new methods of providing cost-effective information of population sizes. |
| IUCN 2007 | The status and distribution of European mammals | Current data on species distributions. |
| Lester et al 2007 | The relationship between dispersal ability and geographic range size | Studies the strength of the relationship between the range of a species and its mode of dispersal. Shows that the mode is not the only determining factor. |
| Daffonchio et al 2006 | Stratified prokaryote network in the oxic–anoxic transition of a deep-sea halocline | Contrary to expectations, deep sea areas near halocline transitions can have very high evels of biological activity even enough to contribute to sediment deposition. |
| Cowan et al 2006 | Scaling of Connectivity in Marine Populations | Larval dispersion is a crucial factor in marine dynamics and seems to correspond with clines in morphology. |
| Worm et al 2005 | Global Patterns of Predator Diversity in the Open Oceans | New research seems to show that there are biodiversity hotspots in the oceans but that the indicators are declining showing that fishing may have a major impact on the system. |
| McCarthy and Parris 2004 | Clarifying the effect of toe clipping on frogs with Bayesian statistics. | Toe clipping reduces accuracy and is unethical. |
| May 2004 | Ethics and amphibians. Nature 431.7007. p43 | Some marking techniques can compromise data accuracy. |
| Ancrenaz et al 2004 | Aerial surveys give new estimates for Orangutans in Sabah, Malaysia | Outlines a new way of finding accurate population numbers in difficult areas. |
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