Copyright 2001, Environmental News Network
October 23, 2001

Researchers from Texas A&M and the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences have developed a mathematical model that predicts which conservation policies are likely to have the highest success rate.

"Dr. Lacher was describing the problems he was encountering in modeling landscapes and ecological environments," says Paulo Lima-Filho of the Department of Mathematics at Texas A&M. "I started realizing that my expertise in topology -- a branch of mathematics -- could be used to provide a general framework to approach the questions he was having in modeling the environment."

The two scientists decided to work together to develop a sort of "mathematical theory of landscape" by using equations to model the environment.

"What I find really exciting in this collaboration," A&M professor Thomas Lacher says, "is the potential to develop predictive tools that would allow us to be proactive in developing conservation policies, instead of being reactive by simply realizing that we have lost habitats and species."

Three more researchers from the Department of Mathematics, Peter Stiller, Michael Pilant and Jay Walton have joined the project. The ecologist and the four mathematicians are now trying to model Costa Rica's forests, pastures and wetlands to map the habitats and describe how they vary over time.

Lacher is a member of The Amisconde Initiative, a joint project with Conservation International and McDonald's to enable sustainable agriculture and restoration of degraded lands in Costa Rica.

To describe how species interact, Lima-Filho uses "the species' allometric parameters, their scaling functions, as well as information from the habitat, to determine how much energy they produce and consume, and how they compete for natural resources."

"Until now, scientists have been superimposing snapshots of landscapes taken at different times in the past," explains Lacher, "whereas a quantitative description of landscape patterns would give us a look at the future."

Preliminary results show that high levels of deforestation may lead to animal extinction rates that are even larger than expected.

"When landscape becomes too fragmented, the risk of extinction may be much higher than you would expect by counting the number of individuals or by presuming that the small habitats communicate with each other, because the smaller populations are no longer inter-breeding," says Lacher.

The model could be used to help scientists restore degraded landscapes by controlling tropical deforestation or agricultural expansion.

"Though biologists have models for behaviors of cells or individual organisms," says Stiller, "we need to devise larger, more integrated models, where you have many interacting species in different environments." Error: Unable to read footer file.