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Wire fence stretching1/17/2024 ![]() ![]() Perhaps the most striking pattern we found was that fences rarely are unambiguously good or bad for an ecosystem. By linking all these studies together, we uncovered important new discoveries about our fenced world. Research had not yet connected the dots between many disparate findings. There were many studies of individual species, but each of them told us only a little on its own. We reviewed a large body of academic literature looking for explanations. In California, Kenya, China and Mongolia, we had all observed animals behaving oddly around fences - gazelles taking long detours around them, for example, or predators following "highways" along fence lines. Our research team became interested in fences by watching animals. This work generated a new scientific discipline, road ecology, that offers unique insights into the startling extent of humanity's reach. They also can promote air and water pollution and vehicle collisions with wildlife. Then, in a burst of research in the 1990s, scientists showed that roads - which also have been part of human civilization for millennia - had narrow footprints but produced enormous environmental effects.įor example, roads can destroy or fragment habitats that wild species rely on to survive. If fences seem like an odd thing for ecologists to study, consider that until recently no one thought much about how roads affected the places around them. Our findings reveal a world that has been utterly reorganized by a rapidly growing latticework of fences. Others have much broader effects, such as hastening the collapse of Kenya's Mara ecosystem. Some of them influence small-scale processes like the building of spider webs. By compiling studies from ecosystems around the world, our research shows that fences produce a complex range of ecological effects. In a recently published study, our team sought to change this situation by offering a set of findings, frameworks and questions that can form the basis of a new discipline: fence ecology. Border fences are often in the news, but other fences are so ubiquitous that they disappear into the landscape, becoming scenery rather than subject. But we know almost nothing about their ecological effects. On every continent, from cities to rural areas and from ancient to modern times, humans have built fences. If our planet's fences were stretched end to end, they would likely bridge the distance from Earth to the Sun multiple times. Recent estimates suggest that the total length of all fencing around the globe is 10 times greater than the total length of roads. What is the most common form of human infrastructure in the world? It may well be the fence. This article was originally published on The Conversation. ![]()
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