Rapid state changes caused by habitat loss propagate to habitat fragments with predictable scaling

Rapid state changes do not occur uniformly across landscapes. In heterogeneous landscapes rapid state changes can occur in some areas as a result of disturbance: do these changes propagate into areas unaffected by the disturbance to ultimately change the state of the whole landscape? In a large-scale fragmentation experiment, rapid state change in matrix habitat rapidly propagated into fragment habitat so that a species' response in habitat fragments was consistently predicted by its response in the matrix at a ratio of about a half. We conclude that rapid state changes in spatially-structured ecosystems can propagate rapidly to the whole landscape.