Henna Fabritius

I develop models that help mitigating conflicts between human land-use and species conservation goals via understanding how landscapes change in time during and after human activity, and how such changes affect species that live in dynamic landscapes. Temporal models on dynamic landscapes can provide relevant information to many different kinds of conservation challenges, such as for the provision of habitat continuity in old-growth forests, as for the conservation of early-successional species that live in urban, semi-urban and agricultural landscapes.

In my current project with Tord Snäll, I model forest species' metapopulation dynamics on the basis of the species’ habitat preferences and forest growth and succession simulations. We utilize both systematically collected data and citizen science data on species sightings. These models will help understanding how natural disturbances, forest succession, predicted land-use patterns and predicted climate change scenarios would affect species survival in the changing forest landscapes in Sweden.

My Ph.D. research focused on the challenges of conservation planning that are related to maintaining a suitable disturbance level and a specific successional stage for conservation purposes. The project included a large fieldwork component related to my study species, the false heath fritillary (Melitaea diamina): a species and habitat distribution survey, a mark-recapture study, a retrospective vegetation study of temporal habitat change, and a conservation consultancy project that reached 100+ meadow landowners. Using this data, I studied individual movement parameters, estimated the habitat destruction and overgrowth rates of M. diamina habitats, compared conservation scenarios and analysed the Finnish policy framework for conserving species living in dynamic landscapes. I also utilize the data to build more advanced models to estimate the (a) optimal species and habitat monitoring frequencies and (b) the consequences of unpredictable allocation of maintenance funding for species living in dynamic landscapes.

Fabritius H, Jokinen A & Cabeza M (2017): Metapopulation perspective to institutional fit: maintenance of dynamic habitat networks. Ecology and Society 22(2):30. doi: 10.5751/ES-09203-220230

Fabritius H & McBride M (2017): Modelling habitat persistence and impacts of management on the habitats of an endangered butterfly. Insect Conservation and Diversity 10:200–210. doi: 10.1111/icad.12218

Fabritius H (2015): Temporal habitat dynamics and conservation planning: The case of the false heath fritillary. Ph.D. thesis. Unigrafia, Helsinki. 148 p.

Fabritius H, Rönkä KH & Ovaskainen O (2015): The dual role of rivers in facilitating or hindering movements of the false heath fritillary butterfly. Movement Ecology. 3:4. 14 p.