Habitat fragmentation effects on biodiversity are contingent on the degree of deforestation: a virtual experiment

While there is broad consensus about the negative impacts of landscape-scale habitat loss on biodiversity across scales, the independent effects of habitat fragmentation have been intensely debated lately. Advancing on this debate is important for the management of biodiversity- friendly human-modified landscapes (HMLs), particularly in the context of tropical forests under rapid land-use changes. However, habitat loss usually implies fragmentation and their effects on biodiversity appears to be highly idiosyncratic. In fact, disentangling the effects of these landscape-scale drivers requires a sampling design that is out-of-reach of empirical approaches to tease apart confounding effects. Bruno will present the virtual framework he developed while in AMAP to simulate realistic tropical forest HMLs and explore how habitat loss and fragmentation jointly mediate tropical forest degeneration from patch to landscape scales.