He Metatron, established in France, offers a robust experimental design for the study of 'meta-systems';

He Metatron, established in France, offers a robust experimental design for the study of “meta-systems”; it consists of 48 (ten 9 10 m) enclosed “patches” (enclosed greenhouses) interconnected by corridors which will be opened or closed. Furthermore, environmental circumstances, including temperature, light intensity, precipitation, and humidity, might be controlled independently within each patch. These manipulative landscape-scale experiments, and several other individuals, have fundamentally improved ecological understanding of habitat loss and fragmentation and provided many guiding principles for conservation.New challenges from landscape-scale conservationThe will need for experimental studies at substantial spatial and temporal scales is increasing as a result of the existing shift toward landscape-scale conservation, which has been widely embraced by conservation communities worldwide (e.g., Boitani et al. 2007; Warboys et al. 2010; Fitzsimons et al. 2013). This strategy is embedded in conservation policy in the Uk (UK) and has resulted in the initiation of numerous landscape-scale schemes (Macgregor et al. 2012). A prominent aspect of this approach to conservation would be the idea of ecological networks, defined as a spatial network of core habitat regions, corridors, stepping stones and buffer zones using the aim of keeping the functioning of ecosystems and rising the persistence and movement of species across fragmented landscapes (Bennett and Wit 2001; Jongman and Pungetti 2004; Bennett and Mulongoy 2006; Lawton et al. 2010). The fundamental concepts behind landscape-scale conservation and ecological networks are appealing and based on sound ecological principles (see Fischer and Lindenmayer 2007; Fahrig 2003; SLOSS principles of Diamond 1975). On the other hand, the very simple and logical principles that have been put forward to guide policy and practice (e.g., Lawton et al. 2010) encompass a potentially wide and complex array of site- and landscape-level actions that happen to be not necessarily compatible or achievable in practice. Here, the?2016 Crown copyright. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley Sons Ltd.WrEN: Woodland Creation and Ecological NetworksK. Watts et al.empirical proof is limited and equivocal (Boitani et al. 2007; Humphrey et al. 2015). There is certainly an ongoing debate inside the scientific and conservation communities on the relative merit of, and balance among, site- and landscape-level actions to conserve biodiversity inside fragmented landscapes. Some authors have promoted sitebased actions to boost habitat quantity no matter spatial configuration (Fahrig 2013), to balance habitat area, isolation, and configuration (Prugh et al. 2009; DNQX web Hanski 2015) or to improve habitat high-quality (Moilanen and Hanski 1998; Hodgson et al. 2009, 2011). Others focus on the merits of landscape-level actions to improve connectivity (Doerr et al. 2011) by means of the creation of corridors (Beier and Noss 1998; Haddad 1999) and actions to enhance the surrounding matrix (Baum et al. 2004; Eycott et al. 2012). Some have argued that ecological networks are based on oversimplifications of complicated ecological concepts and offer tiny for biodiversity conservation PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21251493 beyond a straightforward conceptual framework, which could be misdirecting restricted resources (Boitani et al. 2007). This tends to make it tough to draw conclusions in regards to the relative significance on the individual and combined effects of the diverse components of landscape-scale conservation on a broad suite of species. Priori.