Habitat loss outweighs fragmentation
Résumé
Habitat loss and fragmentation are considered to be one of the main causes of terrestrial biodiversity decline worldwide. The effect of fragmentation at a given level of habitat amount is however debated, and experimental tests remain scarce. To discriminate the effects of both quantity and fragmentation per se, we designed a landscape-scale experiment in which a wide range of habitat amount (9 levels from 1% of habitat to 100%) is crossed with three levels of fragmentation (from clumped to fragmented). Here, we investigate the response of ground-dwelling arthropods to the experimental design over the first three years. The number of captures of all arthropods and some specific groups declined significantly with increasing habitat loss. The effects of habitat fragmentation were predominantly neutral with some significant impacts on the occurrence of certain taxa (e.g. wolf spiders, ground spiders, and A. sericea).
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