Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Landscape ecology plays a vital role in understanding the impacts of land-use change on biodiversity, but it is not a predictive discipline, lacking theoretical models that quantitatively predict biodiversity patterns from first principles. Here, we draw heavily on ideas from phylogenetics to fill this gap, basing our approach on the insight that habitat fragments have a shared history. We develop a landscape 'terrageny', which represents the historical spatial separation of habitat fragments in the same way that a phylogeny represents evolutionary divergence among species. Combining a random sampling model with a terrageny generates numerical predictions about the expected proportion of species shared between any two fragments, the locations of locally endemic species, and the number of species that have been driven locally extinct. The model predicts that community similarity declines with terragenetic distance, and that local endemics are more likely to be found in terragenetically distinctive fragments than in large fragments. We derive equations to quantify the variance around predictions, and show that ignoring the spatial structure of fragmented landscapes leads to over-estimates of local extinction rates at the landscape scale. We argue that ignoring the shared history of habitat fragments limits our ability to understand biodiversity changes in human-modified landscapes.
Source: Ecology Letters
DOI: 10.1111/ele.12160
Institutions: Imperial College London, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, The University of Western Australia, Ecosystem Sciences, University of Minnesota, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, Aberystwyth University, Rockefeller University
Language: English
Subfield: Nature and Landscape Conservation
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $5,300
Awards: Synchrony in metapopulations at multiple time scales: theory, experiments, and field data, Predictable feedbacks between warming, community structure and ecosystem functioning: a combined experimental and theoretical approach, Maintaining biodiversity and ecological resilience in the face of global environmental change, REGROWTH-BR - Detecção Remota de Regeneração de Florestas Tropicais no Brasil: Cartografia e Estimativa de Parâmetros Biofísicos, Using individual metabolism and body size to predict climate warming impacts on aquatic food webs, Terragenesis: Using landscape ontogeny to predict the persistence of species, G8882543853, G8952488736
OpenAlex ID: W1970868035