MORE NATURAL CORRIDORS: A new UC Davis study says that people trying to help nature by designing corridors for wildlife need to think more naturally.

"Human beings tend to think in terms of regular, symmetrical structures, but nature can be much more irregular," said postdoctoral researcher Matthew Holland, the study's lead author. "We found that symmetrical systems of corridors may actually do less good for natural communities than designs with some randomness or asymmetry built in."

Wildlife corridors, which eliminate the physical separation between fragments of plant and animal habitat, can be as big as a swath of river and forest miles wide that links two national parks, or as small as a tunnel under an interstate highway. Without them, animals cannot travel to food, water, mates and shelter, and plants cannot disperse their pollen and seeds to maintain healthy, genetically diverse populations.

Designing and implementing corridors (sometimes called corridor ecology or connectivity conservation) is a new subfield in environmental science. Holland's research is among the first to help land managers and community planners designing corridors know what will work.

Holland's co-author is UC Davis theoretical ecologist Alan Hastings, one of the world's mostly highly regarded experts in using mathematical models (sets of equations) to understand natural systems.

The new study, "Strong Effect of Dispersal Network Structure on Ecological Dynamics," was an advance online publication on Oct. 19, by the journal Nature.

-- Sylvia Wright

ABUSIVE TEEN BOYS: Teenage boys who abuse their girlfriends often describe personal challenges such as growing up with troubled family lives, having little or no support when they began to fail at school, and witnessing violence in their own homes and communities, according to a UC Davis study.

It advocates broadening the view of abusive behaviors within dating relationships to explore the myriad environments -- school, home and community -- that affect boys' lives and actions.

"This is a critically important piece of the puzzle in terms of designing meaningful prevention and intervention programs to prevent adolescent relationship violence," said Elizabeth Miller, the study's senior author, an assistant professor of pediatrics at UC Davis Children's Hospital.

The American Journal of Men's Health published the research, titled "The Social and Emotional Contexts of Adolescent and Young Adult Male Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence: A Qualitative Study."

Read more about the study.

-- Phyllis Brown, UC Davis Health System