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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Devil In A Hula Skirt: Comparative Conservation Efforts Between The United States And Australia Using Two Endemic Species As Case Studies, Sarah Catherine Kuchinsky May 2012

Devil In A Hula Skirt: Comparative Conservation Efforts Between The United States And Australia Using Two Endemic Species As Case Studies, Sarah Catherine Kuchinsky

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

There is a biodiversity crisis in our midst. An abundance of technology and innovation in the last 200 years has revamped our world but at the cost of pushing many species to extinction. Since the passing of the Endangered Species Act by Congress in 1973, more than 100 species in the United States have disappeared (Wilson 2006). The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) stats that "19,265 species out of the 59,507 so far assessed as threatened with extinction," (IUCN 2011). Extinction is the result of a combination of factors caused by human environmental disturbance. Disturbances in the …


Living More Than Just Enough For The City: Persistence Of High-Quality Vegetation In Natural Areas In An Urban Setting, Rebecca W. Dolan, Jessica D. Stephens, Marcia E. Moore Oct 2011

Living More Than Just Enough For The City: Persistence Of High-Quality Vegetation In Natural Areas In An Urban Setting, Rebecca W. Dolan, Jessica D. Stephens, Marcia E. Moore

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Urban environments pose special challenges to flora, including altered disturbance regimes, habitat fragmentation, and increased opportunity for invasion by non-native species. In addition, urban natural area represents most people’s contact with nature, given the majority of the world’s population currently live in cities. We used coefficients of conservatism (C-values), a system that ranks species based on perceived fidelity to remnant native plant communities that retain ecological integrity, to quantify habitat quality of 14 sites covering 850 ha within the city of Indianapolis, Indiana, in the Midwestern United States. All sites contained significant natural area and were inventoried via intensive complete …