Speaker
Description
Habitat loss and fragmentation are interacting phenomena that are appreciated to shape patterns of biodiversity. While this fact is widely acknowledged, it remains difficult to make statements about their effects on biodiversity generally. This may be due in part to the scale dependent approaches that are taken to understand their impact on biodiversity, where some studies focus on patterns across a landscape, and others on the scale of individual fragments. These different approaches can provide conflicting intuition regarding the effects habitat loss and fragmentation on biodiversity. Here we take an approach that focuses on the underlying ecological processes of the biodiversity to parse apart the mechanisms that create the scale-dependent patterns observed in empirical studies. Using a theoretical approach, we explore how competition, dispersal and habitat specialization in metacommunities structure biodiversity dynamics in fragmented landscapes. At the landscape scale we find that habitat loss/fragmentation can drive both positive and negative responses in richness depending on both the strength of dispersal and degree of habitat specialization in the metacommunity. At the fragment scale we find that competition and dispersal are the main processes influencing the relationship between fragment size and biodiversity. We suggest that explicitly taking into account metacommunity processes can help parse conflicting empirical patterns of biodiversity response to habitat loss and fragmentation at multiple spatial scales.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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