Short-term responses of ground-dwelling arthropod communities to habitat loss and fragmentation in experimental mesoscale landscapes.

ABSTRACT: Habitat loss and fragmentation are main drivers of biodiversity decline. However, disentangling their respective effects remains tricky and contrasting results have emerged in previous studies leading to a call for finely designed landscape-scale experiments that compare different levels of habitat fragmentation at fixed habitat loss, and that for different levels of habitat loss. Here we present early-stage results from MESOLAND, a new landscape-scale experiment designed to monitor the response of ground-dwelling arthropod communities to habitat loss and fragmentation, focusing on their short-term responses. Our experiment took place in a dry grassland in France, with natural stone cover representing the habitat and bare soil with stone cover manually removed being the matrix. We thus cre

SUBMITTER: Albert CH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12314002 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature