gap, including Tom Lovejoy, who designed a large-scale experiment that studied the effects of different sizes of fragmentation to animals, plants, and ecological processes. The original idea was conceived in 1977. Lovejoy’s objective throughout the experiment was to gain insight on the effects of habitat fragmentation on species in tropical rainforests. He called it the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project (the name was later changed to the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project). In 1978, Lovejoy hired Rob Bierregaard to implement the project on the ground. In 1979 the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) endorsed and Brazil's National Research Council approved Lovejoy’s experiment. As soon as the permits were granted, Bierregaard moved to Brazil to launch the project in the rainforests on the north of Manaus. The BDFFP began as a collaborative project between the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research and the World Wildlife Fund. It is now a joint project between INPA and the Smithsonian Institution. The BDFFP became one of the most important studies of fragmentation in tropical forests because it is the only long-running study with data before fragments were created with the original data being from the continuous forest. Project development and hypothesis The study of habitat fragmentation found its roots early, with Aldo Leopold’s ideas on edge effect and Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson’s studies and models of island biogeography laying a foundation for the field (Laurance and Bierregaard 1997). These concepts offer potential applicable and hypothetico-deductive value for the study of forest fragmentation and have inspired debates about habitat reserve design. Generally speaking, the theory of island biogeography represents a collection of interwoven ideas (Harris 1984), describing patterns of floral and faunal communities on marine islands. It models fundamental processes such as dispersal, diversity and population dynamics of islands with regards to their area and distance from other islands or the mainland. Theoretically, forest fragments take on the characteristics of habitat islands in proportion to their degree of and length of time of isolation (Harris 1984). Island biogeography theory and lessons learned from true-island biogeography provide a basis for developing a management strategy and addressing specific decision variables, such as reserve patch size, distribution, placement and protective measures (Harris 1984). Nevertheless, a notable difference between oceanic islands and terrestrial islands, or fragments, is the existence of land surrounding or between the fragments, referred to as the matrix. The impacts of