{"id":277211,"date":"2020-12-01T01:23:12","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T06:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=277211"},"modified":"2020-12-01T01:23:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T06:23:12","slug":"fences-have-big-effects-on-land-and-wildlife-around-the-world-that-are-rarely-measure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/12\/01\/fences-have-big-effects-on-land-and-wildlife-around-the-world-that-are-rarely-measure\/","title":{"rendered":"Fences have big effects on land and wildlife around the world that are rarely measure"},"content":{"rendered":"
Australia\u2019s dingo fences, built to protect livestock from wild dogs, stretch for thousands of kilometers.
\nMarian Deschain\/Wikimedia<\/a>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alex McInturff <\/a>University of California Santa Barbara, <\/a><\/em>Christine Wilkinson <\/a>University of California Berkeley<\/a><\/em>, Wenjing Xu <\/a>University of California Berkeley, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

What is the most common form of human infrastructure in the world? It may well be the fence. Recent estimates suggest that the total length of all fencing around the globe is 10 times greater than the total length of roads<\/a>. If our planet\u2019s fences were stretched end to end, they would likely bridge the distance from Earth to the Sun multiple times.<\/p>\n

On every continent, from cities to rural areas and from ancient<\/a> to modern<\/a> times, humans have built fences. But we know almost nothing about their ecological effects. Border fences are often in the news<\/a>, but other fences are so ubiquitous that they disappear into the landscape, becoming scenery rather than subject.<\/p>\n

In a recently published study<\/a>, 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. By compiling studies from ecosystems around the world, our research shows that fences produce a complex range of ecological effects.<\/p>\n

Some of them influence small-scale processes like the building of spider webs<\/a>. Others have much broader effects, such as hastening the collapse of Kenya\u2019s Mara ecosystem<\/a>. Our findings reveal a world that has been utterly reorganized by a rapidly growing latticework of fences.<\/p>\n