Department of Environmental Conservation

Professor

413-577-0655 
304 Holdsworth
Email: mcgarigalkmcgarigalk(at)eco.umass.edu
personal home page

Primary Interests  

Dr. McGarigal’s overall professional goal, achieved through research, teaching, and outreach, is to improve our understanding of how landscapes are structured physically and biologically and the agents responsible for those patterns, how these patterns affect the distribution and dynamics of animal populations, how these patterns and processes change over time, and how to apply this information to better manage natural resources over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Accordingly, a major goal of his research program is to provide natural resource managers with information and tools that will enable them to become better stewards of healthy and sustainable ecosystems.

Current Major Projects

• FRAGSTATS: Spatial Pattern Analysis Software for Quantifying Landscape Pattern
   
• Rocky Mountain Landscape Simulator (RMLANDS): Quantifying Dynamics in Landscape Structure and Wildlife Habitat Under Alternative Disturbance Scenarios
   
• Conservation Assessment and Prioritization System (CAPS): An Interactive Decision-Support System
   
• Metapopulation dynamics of marbled salamanders in central Massachusetts: an empirical field study
   
• Wildfire Disturbance Ecology of Rocky Mountain Ponderosa Pine Forests: Conservation Implications
   
• Ecology and conservation of eastern spadefoot toads on Cape Cod National Seashore
   
• Ecology and conservation of piping plovers on Long Island, New York

Courses Taught

• NRC 549 Ecosystem Management
• NRC 621 Landscape Ecology
• NRC 631 Multivariate Statistics for Wildlife and Ecology Research

Selected Recent Publications

Publications – Books

McGarigal, K., S. Cushman, and S. G. Stafford. 2000. Multivariate Statistics for Wildlife and Ecology Research. Springer-Verlag, New York.

Publications–Refereed

Jenkins, C. L., K. McGarigal, and L. Gamble. (Submitted). Orientation of movements and habitat selection in a spatially-structured population of marbled salamanders (Ambystoma opacum). J. Herpetology.

Cushman, S.A., B. Compton, and K. McGarigal. (Submitted). Modeling the Fragmentation of Vernal-Pool Breeding Amphibian Populations in Western Massachusetts due to Roads, Agriculture and Residential Development. Ecological Applications.

Gamble, L.R., K. McGarigal, C.L. Jenkins, and B.C. Timm. (Submitted). Limitations of regulated “buffer zones” for the conservation of marbled salamanders, Ambystoma opacum. Wetlands.

Gamble, L.R., K. McGarigal, and C.L. Jenkins. (Submitted). Landscape-level population structure and local variability in northern populations of marbled salamanders. Oikos.

Neel, M. C., K. McGarigal, and S. A. Cushman. 2004. Behavior of class-level landscape metrics across gradients of class aggregation and area. Landscape Ecology 19:435-455.

Cushman, S. A., and K. McGarigal. 2004. Hierarchical analysis of forest bird species-environment relationships in the Oregon Coast Range. Ecological Applications 14:1090-1105.

Cushman, S. A., and K. McGarigal. 2004. Choice of response variable in multi-scale studies of species-environment relationships. Oikos 105:117-124.

Cushman, S. A., and K. McGarigal. 2003. Landscape-level patterns of avian diversity in the Oregon Coast Range. Ecological Monographs 73:259-281.

Jenkins, C. L., K. McGarigal, and L. Gamble. 2003. Comparative effectiveness of two trapping techniques for surveying the abundance and diversity of forest floor vertebrates along drift fence arrays. Herpetological Review 34:39-42.

Thompson, C. M., and K. McGarigal. 2002. The influence of research scale on bald eagle habitat selection along the lower Hudson River, New York. Landscape Ecology 17:569-586.

Cushman, S. A., and K. McGarigal. 2002. Hierarchical, multi-scale decomposition of species-environment relationships. Landscape Ecology 17:637-646.

McGarigal, K., and S. Cushman. 2002. Comparative evaluation of experimental approaches to the study of habitat fragmentation. Ecological Applications 12(2):335-345.

Jenkins, C. L., K. McGarigal, and L. Gamble. 2002. A comparison of aquatic surveying techniques used to sample Ambystoma opacum Larvae. Herpetological Review 33:33-35.

McGarigal, K., W. Romme, M. Crist, and E. Roworth. 2001. Cumulative effects of Logging and road-building on landscape structure in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado. Landscape Ecology 16:327-349.

Publications–Technical

McGarigal, K. And W.H. Romme. 2003. Simulate landscape changes. Geoworld 16(7):38-43.

McGarigal, K., S. A. Cushman, M. C. Neel, and E. Ene. 2002. FRAGSTATS: Spatial Pattern Analysis Program for Categorical Maps. Computer software program produced by the authors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Available at the following web site: www.umass.edu/landeco/research/fragstats/fragstats.html

Publications–Book Chapters 

McGarigal, K., and S. Cushman. 2005. The gradient concept of landscape structure. Pages 112-119 in J. Wiens and M. Moss, eds. Issues and Perspectives in Landscape Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

McGarigal, K. 2002. Landscape pattern metrics. Volume 2, pp 1135-1142 in A. H. El-Shaarawi and W. W. Piegorsch, eds. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England.