UAlberta biodiversity researcher Fangliang He contributed his expertise to an international study of why small mammals are rapidly vanishing from forest islands created by a reservoir project in Thailand.
UAlberta researcher brings biodiversity expertise to international study of why small mammals are vanishing from forest islands. A leading biodiversity expert at the University of Alberta was part of an international team of scientists that documented the near-extinction of native small mammals on forest islands created by a large hydroelectric reservoir in Thailand. The findings are another example of evidence that land fragmentation accelerates local extinction of species, says Fangliang He , a researcher in the U of A's Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences. He, a Canada Research Chair in Biodiversity and Landscape Modelling at the U of A, contributed to analyzing the data and modelling the biodiversity loss on the islands. "The model shows a rapid erosion of biodiversity after the reservoir was built. The evidence is clear that habitat fragmentation accelerates local extinction of species," He said. "It was like ecological Armageddon," said Luke Gibson from the National University of Singapore, who led the study.
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