Research Interests - Dr. Robert Dawley

Habitat fragmentation, caused by human activities, impacts animal populations by reducing habitat size and impeding movement between habitats. Ursinus College, located in an area undergoing rapid transition from a rural to a suburban environment, provides an ideal setting to study such impacts on one of the most abundant native species, the white-footed mouse, Peromyscus leucopus (the notorious purveyor of Lyme Disease). In collaboration with Ellen Dawley, our students and I have been using live-trapping techniques for several years now to examine mouse population levels in several local forests. As expected, we find the mice in woodlots and at the boundary between woodlots and fields but not in open fields with low cut vegetation. In the project proposed here, we plan to trap and tag mice in forests separated by regions of unsuitable habitat (e.g., the fields of low-cut vegetation that occupy gas pipeline and high tension line right-of-ways) to access the extent to which the latter represent barriers to mouse movement and dispersal.