We have a fun, online survey and we need your help!
What kind of landscape patterns do you think are good for conservation?
How do your impressions compare to current simulation models?
Do we generally agree or have we yet to achieve consensus?
We are investigating the effectiveness of different landscapes for
different conservation criteria (genetic variability, population
viability, species richness and ecosystem functioning) and are
interested in the current perceptions of scientists, conservation
practitioners and policy makers on what are the important landscape
characteristics for each. We have made a simple online survey in order
for people to assess landscapes and rank them for ecological and
evolutionary processes contributing to biodiversity conservation.
The survey can be found here:
http://scales.ckff.si/scaletool/cn_survey.php
We welcome as many responses as possible with any degree of expertise to
fill out the survey - there is a question about experience and how
confident you are in your rankings. The survey shows you 15 simple
habitat patterns and asks you to rank their conservation value according
to a criterion of your choice, for a type of organism or biodiversity
that you know well, at particular spatial scales. You can redo the
survey for multiple taxa and scales if you want.
We'll use the results to compare expert assessments with outputs from
simulation models. This is an important part of validating the models,
as well as looking at agreement among experts.
Also, if you leave your email at the end of the survey we can even
feedback how your results compare with other experts and simulation models.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Richard Gunton, Dirk Schmeller and Charlie Marsh.
The SCALES project (www.scales-project.net)
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Charles Marsh
Research Fellow in Computational Ecology
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT, UK
