Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project - History

History

The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, commonly known as the BDFFP, was born out of the SLOSS (single large or several small reserves of equal area) debate in the mid - 1970s (Laurance et al. 2004) about the application of the theory of island biogeography to conservation planning. The debate determined that the species richness and the rate of growth increase as the area of a reserve increases. It also determined that the shape of a reserve is very important to the species diversity. Reserves with a large surface area to volume ratio tend to be affected more by edge effects than reserves with a small surface area to volume ratio. The distance between reserves and the habitat surrounding the reserves (the matrix) can affect species richness and diversity as well (Tjorve 2010).

Despite the seeming logic of these ideas, ecologists questioned the results of the SLOSS debate due to the lack of a critical body of evidence on the subject. Many ecologists began to conduct studies and experiments on fragmented ecosystems to fill this gap, including Tom Lovejoy, who designed a large-scale experiment that studied the effects of different sizes of fragmentation to animals, plants, and ecological processes. Lovejoy’s objective throughout the experiment was to gain insight on the effects of habitat fragmentation on species in tropical rainforests. He called it the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project (the name was later changed to the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project).

In 1979, the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) endorsed Lovejoy’s experiment. Later, Lovejoy teamed up with Richard Bierregaard to assist him with the project by assigning him the responsibility of conducting all of the fieldwork. The two ecologists started the project in rainforests on the outskirts of Manaus, Brazil. The BDFFP is a collaborative project between the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research and the Smithsonian Institution. The BDFFP would become one of the most important studies of fragmentation in tropical forests because it is the only long running study with data before fragments were created with the original data being from the continuous forest (Laurance et al. 2004) .