Greetings all,

On Thursday, July, 21 we sent out a mass email to many of our colleagues around the world (copy of the email text included below). At this time we are still looking for study sites and for those of you who have responded with potential sites we will be contacting you shortly – thanks for taking the time to read our email and respond. Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome any new comers to our website. Hopefully you will find the information on this site useful and will be able to suggest a study site for us. In order to find suitable landscapes for our analysis we are depending on you (our colleagues, friends,  and conservation minded public) to help us find study sites, so please share this site with your friends and colleagues. One of the easiest and quickest ways you could do this is to take a minute now, go to our Facebook page, and ‘Like’ us there. Thanks again for all your support and interest thus far and we look forward to working with many of you in the near future.

Thanks,

Andy

CC of the mas email sent out on Thursday, July, 21, 2011.

Dear colleague,

Please excuse this unsolicited email. Please take a minute to consider whether you can recommend a good study site, and to forward this message to appropriate colleagues.

We (Paul Beier and Andy Gregory) need your help to find study sites at which we can assess the ability of big corridors (the sort of corridors typically proposed as conservation interventions) to promote long-term gene flow. Many studies have demonstrated that short linear features promote animal movement over short distances when the area outside the corridor is relatively natural, but we are interested in corridors over a half-mile long embedded in urban, row crop, or industrial areas. And we don’t want to measure success in terms of movement of individual animals; instead we will measure success in terms of long-term gene flow. Thus we need landscapes that have been stable for 20 to 50 years – long enough that the pattern of corridors and patches will have affected genetic patterns. We seek about 100 landscapes (each with 1 or more corridors) for our study, and we will study landscapes on all continents. We need many landscapes because doubtless some corridors provide gene flow across human-dominated areas, and other corridors fail to do so. With a large sample, we can identify what traits are associated with successful corridors.

Although we are highly selective about what landscapes we will study, we will study any reptile, amphibian, mammal, flightless arthropod, or sedentary bird that is likely to be found in the corridor, but not in the human-dominated matrix.

Please suggest appropriate landscapes for this study (and learn more about the study design and rationale) at docorridorswork.org. Even if you delete this email quickly, please remember the URL (DoCorridorsWork.org) in case you later realize that you know of a good site. We are offering finders a small finder’s fee, and immediate access to the genetic data from your site. Please forward this email to anyone you think may be able to help! Thank you.