Dr. Jochen A.G. Jaeger studied
physics at the Christian-Albrecht University in
Kiel, Germany, and at the ETH Zurich. He
received his PhD from the Department of
Environmental Sciences at the ETH Zurich. He
held a position at the Centre of Technology
Assessment in Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart,
Germany, and lectured at the University of
Stuttgart, Germany. From 2001 to 2003, he was a
postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Lenore Fahrig in
her Landscape Ecology Laboratory (Department of
Biology Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada).
From 2003 to 2007 he was a research fellow at
the ETH in Zurich funded by the German Research
Foundation DFG. He is currently conducting three
research projects about the drivers of urban
sprawl in Europe, the effectiveness of wildlife
passages along a major highway in Quebec, and
the role of uncertainties in environmental
impact assessment in Canada. He is working in
the fields of environmental indicators, the
quantification and assessment of landscape
structure and landscape change, landscape
ecology, road ecology, urban sprawl, ecological
modelling, environmental impact assessment, and
novel concepts of problem-oriented
transdisciplinary research.
More information:
1. ETH-Life reports of December 2005 and May 2006
about the project on measuring the degree of
landscape fragmentation in Switzerland (funded by
the Swiss Federal Roads Authority ASTRA and the
Federal Office for the Environment FOEN): 1st
Report (Dec 2005) (PDF)/
2nd
Report (May 2006) (PDF).
2. Leaflet on the topic of landscape
fragmentation and the effective mesh size. (PDF)
3. Miniposter and abstract about the project on
landscape fragmentation in Switzerland. (PDF
Poster)
4. Miniposter and abstract about the project on
urban sprawl in Switzerland. (PDF
Poster)
Links:
1. Road effects model for predicting when animal
populations are at risk from roads: an interactive
model of road avoidance behaviour
Click
here
to start the model
Roads
and traffic affect animal populations
detrimentally in four ways: they decrease
habitat amount and quality, enhance mortality
due to collisions with vehicles, prevent access
to resources on the other side of the road, and
subdivide animal populations into smaller and
more vulnerable fractions. Roads will affect
persistence of animal populations differently
depending on (1) road avoidance behavior of the
animals (i.e., noise avoidance, road surface
avoidance, and car avoidance); (2) population
sensitivity to the four road effects; (3) road
size; and (4) traffic volume. We have created a
model based on these population and road
characteristics to study the questions: (1) what
types of road avoidance behaviors make
populations more vulnerable to roads?; (2) what
types of roads have the greatest impact on
population persistence?; and (3) how much does
the impact of roads vary with the relative
population sensitivity to the four road effects?
Our results suggest that, in general, the most
vulnerable populations are those with high noise
and high road surface avoidance, and secondly,
those with high noise avoidance only.
Conversely, the least vulnerable populations are
those with high car avoidance only, and
secondly, high road surface and high car
avoidance. Populations with low overall road
avoidance and those with high overall road
avoidance tend to respond in opposite ways when
the sensitivity to the four road effects is
varied. The same is true of populations with
high road surface avoidance when compared to
those with high car and high noise avoidance.
The model further predicted that traffic volume
has a larger effect than road size on the impact
of roads on population persistence. One
potential application of our model is to
generate predictions for more structured field
studies of road avoidance behavior and its
influence on persistence of wildlife
populations.
Published in Jaeger et al. (2005), Ecological
Modelling, 185, 329–348 (PDF).
Link to
Dr. Jaeger's website at Concordia University:
http://gpe.concordia.ca/faculty-and-staff/jjaeger/
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