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American Journal of Plant Sciences, 2012, 3, 869-878 869 /10.4236/ajps.2012.37104 Published Online July 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ajps) Edge Effects in Small Forest Fragments: Why More Is Better? 1 2 3 Milind Bunyan , Shibu Jose , Robert Fletcher 1School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA; 2The Center for Agroforestry, School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA; 3Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Flor- ida, Gainesville, USA. Email: joses@ Received May 2nd, 2012; revised May 30th, 2012; accepted June 9th, 2012 ABSTRACT Edge to interior gradients in forest fragments can influence the species composition and community structure as a result of variations in microenvironment and edaphic variables. We investigated the response of microenvironment and ed- aphic variables to distance from a tropical montane forest (locally known as shola)-grassland edge using one-edge and multiple-edge models. The edpahic variables did not show any differences between the grassland and shola soils. We observed that conventional one-edge models sufficiently explained variation trends in microenvironment along the edge to interior gradient in large fragments. As with other studies on small fragments though, we observed no edge effects with the use of a conventional one-edge model. However, the inclusion of multiple edges in small fragments signifi- cantly improved model fit. We can conclude that small fragments dominated by edge habitat may in fact resemble lar- ger fragments with the inclusion of multiple edges. Our models did not evaluate non-linear effects which often better explain patterns in edge-interior gradients. The incorporation of such non-linear models in the system might further im- prove model fit. Ke