The biggest losers: habitat isolation deconstructs complex food webs from top to bottom.

ABSTRACT: Habitat fragmentation threatens global biodiversity. To date, there is only limited understanding of how the different aspects of habitat fragmentation (habitat loss, number of fragments and isolation) affect species diversity within complex ecological networks such as food webs. Here, we present a dynamic and spatially explicit food web model which integrates complex food web dynamics at the local scale and species-specific dispersal dynamics at the landscape scale, allowing us to study the interplay of local and spatial processes in metacommunities. We here explore how the number of habitat patches, i.e. the number of fragments, and an increase of habitat isolation affect the species diversity patterns of complex food webs (α-, β-, γ-diversities). We specifically test whether there is a

SUBMITTER: Ryser R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6710599 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature