Great NY Times commentary on habitat fragmentation

NY Time commentator Olivia Judson posted a terrific piece today, Divide and Diminish, about habitat fragmentation and biodiversity.  While the information isn't necessarily new, her explanations about island biogeography and related processes puts things in good perspective.

Here's an excerpt:

Although “island” tends to conjure images of small bodies of land surrounded by water, such as Bermuda, or the Falkland Islands, this is not the only kind of island out there. Lakes are islands of water surrounded by land. Caves are islands of darkness surrounded by light. Oases are islands of fertility surrounded by sand. In short, an island is any self-contained patch of habitat within some larger sea. Looked at this way, the garden outside my window is an island of parkland in an ocean of bricks and concrete.

For we humans are island makers. We routinely fragment former “oceans”— be they tracts of forest or prairie, or some other vast ecosystem — leaving remnants here and there. These remnants are, from a biological point of view, islands.

She goes on to discuss roads as one of the causes of fragmentation, as well as numerous other human activities.  The key point of her article is that future land mammals will not be as big as current land mammals, because of  ever increasing fragmentation caused by roads and other development.  Fragmentation,  in combination with water quality, are the two primary reasons that Wildlands CPR works to reduce new road construction and promote road reclamation in wildland ecosystems - for precisely the type of reasons that Judson writes about.