Assessing the quality of fragmented landscape quality and the viability of resulting meta-communities remains a crucial task for ecologists in the light of unprecedented rates of habitat loss. With rising interest in different ecological indicators for the identification of areas of conservation importance, substantial research effort has been undertaken to evaluate the usefulness of both landscape metrics and species measures for assessing the complexity and functionality of meta-communities in fragmented landscapes.
While these indicators capture the structural complexity of the landscape and usability of the landscape for different species, they fail to take into account the dynamics of the complexity and functionality of the meta-community itself. This work investigates the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on coadapted meta-communities, applying an information-theoretic based measure of landscape flux integrity which takes into account species diversity, landscape structure and species dynamics across the landscape simultaneously. We investigate the effects of different patch and connectivity removal strategies derived from the proposed measure of landscape integrity, looking both at empirical data of fragmented landscapes as well as simulation results from a complex systems based interaction-driven model of community ecology.
Results/Conclusions
Subsequently reducing habitat based on the contribution of patches to landscape flux integrity increases population persistence significantly compared to alternative strategies based for example on size or pure connectivity. The same significant difference applies for the reduction of landscape connectivity. The difference between landscape disturbance strategies becomes more pronounced, the more coadapted communities in the single patches are, indicating the importance of the interactions within and between sub-communities of a meta-community for overall community persistence in the light of habitat destruction.
The results imply that habitat conservation strategies shouldn’t be based on purely structural considerations or indicator species alone. Taking into account the dynamics of the sub-communities on the landscapes and their organisation in terms of flux patterns can provide deeper insights into the functionality and complexity of a meta-community in a fragmented landscape and give valuable implications for the identification of areas of conservation importance.