Amanda Martin
Degree in progress: PhD
Supervisor: Dr. Lenore Fahrig
My Research:
Human land use is widely considered to be a major driver of the current decline in biodiversity. The negative effects of land use on populations and species has largely been attributed to changes in structure; particularly habitat loss, fragmentation, and declines in quality. My PhD is focused on one biotic process which may contribute to the negative effects of human land use on population persistence: inter-patch movement. I am particularly interested in how animals respond to landscape structure during inter-patch movement (e.g. avoidance of boundaries between cover types, changing speed and tortuosity of movements), and how this behaviour may impact movement success in human-altered landscapes. I will be using a combination of agent-based modeling and observational study to investigate 1) the influence of the historic or “natural” landscape structure on the evolution of movement characteristics and the risks associated with the continued use of these movement characteristics in human-altered landscapes, and 2) the accuracy of models which seek to predict animal movement routes based on an assumed set of movement characteristics.