Biotic and abiotic relationships, such as the relationship between water, plants and insects, have a large impact on the environment. Insects are very abundant organisms in almost any ecosystem. They serve a variety of ecological functions including, but not limited to: helping plants reproduce, acting as a food source for many organisms, and serving as a mechanism for disease transfer (Hauser and Riede, 2015). In a riparian system, numerous amounts of insects switch from water to land constantly. In a water source such as a lake, there is a much larger amount of movement than in a smaller source like a stream (Gratton and Zanden, 2009). It has been shown that there is a decrease in insect abundance as the distance increases from the water source (Jackson and Resh, 1989).
the 1960s individual rights regarding social attitudes of sexuality had been liberalising throughout North America and parts of Europe through counter-cultural experimentation, radical politics and increase in young educated people (Brown, 2008); this liberalisation of attitudes has continued, notwithstanding constant struggles by sexual minorities to be recognised. As such there has been an increase in gay villages/districts in the westernised world and gradual destigmatisation of these areas, as a spatially compact place in which an oppressed community can be protected from wider homophobic and heteronormative oppression through the collective habitation of queer people (Castells, 1983). This territorialisation of urban, fluid spaces (Nash, 2006) creates a space in which queer culture can be celebrated, through the believed subversion of heteronormative philosophies. Thus, gay villages and districts have become assimilated into urban metrospheric frameworks and economies, and promoted as being an inclusive, safe space in which queer culture can be celebrated.
The term safe space has become adopted by the academic community that has become widely recognised in social sciences (Stengel and Weems, 2010), especially in relation to queer theory and LGBT issues (Peters 2003; Poynter and Tubbs 2008); many consider these gay villages as a safe space due to their temporal solidarity and struggle. Historically that was true, but within contemporary queer society, these places have become an ever-more contested site through intra-community discrimination based upon identity components. There are bodies of literature demonstrating this, for people with disabilities (Ramlow 2009; Shakespeare 1996; Casey 2007), age (Hunter et al. 1998; Casey 2007; Simpson 2013), race (Held, 2015), gender (Stryker 2008), class (Taylor 2009), body size (Brand et al., 1992) and sexuality (Casey 2004) – using homonormative principles to describe what the idealised gay body, as a young and slim, or big and muscular homosexual male (Casey, 2007). Binnie (2004) furthers this idea of the ideal image, and the antitheses of it: the queer unwanted, which denotes the inability to fully participate in queer activities. Casey (2007) develops this thought, as these villages/districts have become increasingly-marketed towards this idealised gay or lesbian image. This is problematic as these places are commonly thought about as a safe space in which people can perform their sexuality free from outside persecution, and are increasingly becoming less safe due to the pressures to conform, exhibited through relational semiotics (Zebracki and Milani, 2017). As such, gay villages that should be places of topophila (Tuan, 1990), are coming to be topophobic landscapes in which queer people feel restricted to freely act, thus being repressed by hetero and homonormative cultures, deconstructing the notion of safe space.
