Experiments on corridors, meanwhile, are difficult to pull off because the areas needed to test and repeat them are so large at least for large animals that typically range over wide areas.
An experiment exploring whether corridors benefit black bears, for example, would require an area equal to the bears' range of hundreds of miles. And other similarly huge natural areas would be needed to repeat the experiment to test its conclusions. As a result, most scientifically rigorous corridor experiments have taken place on much smaller scales. One noted experiment, for instance, focused on insect distribution on 20-by-20-square-inch plots of moss arranged in connected and unconnected patches.
The UF-led team sought to increase the scale considerably.
The researchers mapped out eight similar sites, each about 158 acres along the South Carolina-Georgia state line. This site, the Savannah River Site National Environmental Research Park, is a 482-square-mile federally protected research area originally set aside during the Cold War for nuclear weapons development.
Forests of 50-year-old pine trees dominate all eight sites. At the researchers' request, the U.S. Forest Service arranged for workers to log trees and burn the remaining groundcover in selected areas, creating one central clearing and four peripheral clearings on each site. They also logged corridors connecting each central clearing to one of the peri
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Contact: Josh Tewksbury
jtewksbury@zoo.ufl.edu
803-725-1769
University of Florida
16-Sep-2002