What Is Anthropogenic Habitat Fragmentation?

Anthropogenic habitat fragmentation has affected, and will continue to affect the dynamics of populations for most organism types that are subjected to it. From the physical structures we construct for the conveniences of humankind to the deterioration of continuity in our forests and other vast ecosystems that we have exploited to support urbanization and development of land, we are changing the ways in which organisms can use the landscapes to which they have evolved. By creating barriers and inhospitable divisions in the landscape we effectively divide single populations into subpopulations and often reduce or eliminate the mixing of individuals between these subpopulations. While fragmentation happens through many natural processes that the earth is subjected to, these natural divisions seem to happen very slowly relative to the rate of anthropogenic fragmentation. At a slow enough rate of fragmentation organisms should be able to adjust and adapt. This may not be so when land can be
The sampled area was divided into several smaller pieces by roads of varying age and width that do not follow any geographical features. They hypothesized that over the area of both smaller and larger fragments of forest that were sampled, sampling sites of sub-populations would not be geographically far enough apart from one another to result in genetic differentiation between sampling sites due to the distance alone. Additionally they hypothesized that the number of roads separating any two given sampling sites would influence genetic variation and the amount of time the road has been constructed, due to the added challenge of crossing a road. Finally they posited that the amount of genetic variation would depend on the size of the fragment sampled, with smaller fragments being less genetically diverse than the larger