The next thing you know you've got a fragmented forest. You can't just bemoan forest fragmentation without thinking about the social structure and transportation system that lead to it. The forest is a macro-organism, a community of living things interconnected by a vast web of root graphs, symbiotic threads that bind roots to fungal mycorrhizae, and an infinite variety of interrelationships between plants, animals and microbes, many of which we will never fully understand. When it comes to forest habitat, the sum of the parts is exceeded by the value of the whole. It takes generations for an ecosystem to mature and to express itself ecologically and aesthetically.
Fragmentation affects the ecological integrity of forest habitat.
Increased boundaries between habitats, known as edge, lowers the quality of habitat for species that favor large, unbroken forest. Fragmentation encourages an incursion of species that thrive where forest edges border on other kinds of habitat, including invasive and exotic species such as raccoons, Brown-headed Cowbirds, and many insects and diseases. Some birds, such as the Chestnut-sided Warbler and Mourning Warbler, nest in clearings during the first few years of sprouting that follow a forest cutting. These issues are of concern to biologists in the less populated regions of northern New England, such as Vermont's former State Naturalist, Charles Johnson. We've been doing all kinds of things just to compare numbers of birds, movements of birds, behavior of birds, reproductive success of birds.