How does forest fragmentation affect biodiversity? A meta-analysis

SCHINDLER, STEFAN; GALLARDO, ALBERTO; GONZÁLEZ, EDGARD; ROSINA M. SOLER ESTEBAN; CORDONNIER, THOMAS; BESSA, PAULO; VASILIKI, KATI

Concepción

Congreso; IUFRO Landscape Ecology Conference; 2012

The relation between landscape structure and species diversity is a major research topic in landscape ecology, population ecology, biogeography, and conservation biology. Here, we performed a meta-analysis encompassing aspects of forest landscape structure and all groups of organisms. Asystematic title search in ISI Web of Science and Scopus databases yielded 200 relevant papers. We assessed how species richness and species diversities were related to patch size, patch shape complexity and isolation of forest fragments, as well as to the proportion of forest and to the heterogeneity of the surrounding landscape. We compared (i) different systematic and functional groups of plants and animals, (ii) native and alien species, (iii) generalist and specialist species, and (iv) tropical and temperate forest landscapes, and we used the naturalness of the study areas as a covariate. First results indicate that forest patch size, forest patch shape complexity and proportion of habitat in the surrounding landscape were positively related with species diversity, while patch isolation showed an ambiguous relation, whose strength differed among taxa. Plants were strongly related to landscape heterogeneity, whereas animals were most sensitive to forest patch area. Differences between tropical and temperate forests were hardly detectable. This study contributes to the theoretical framework of the main ecological drivers of global change related biodiversity loss. Our findings also provide evidence for the choice of landscape indicators of species richness in forest landscapes.