Ewers, R.M., Didham, R.K., Pearse, W.D. et al. (5 more authors) (2013) Using landscape history to predict biodiversity patterns in fragmented landscapes. Ecology Letters, 16. pp. 1221-1233. ISSN 1461-023X
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2013 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and CNRS This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Distance-dissimilarity curve; habitat fragmentation; habitat loss; landscape divergence hypothesis; nested communities; neutral model; random sampling; spatial autocorrelation; spatial insurance; vicariance model |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematics and Statistics (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 Aug 2016 09:11 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2023 21:58 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.12160 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/ele.12160 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:94175 |
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