Matrix composition mediates effects of habitat fragmentation: a modelling study

Context Habitat loss has clear negative effects on biodiversity, but whether fragmentation per se (FPS), excluding habitat loss does is debatable. A contribution to this debate may be that many fragmentation studies tend to use landscapes of fragmented focal-habitat and a single vastly different species-poor intervening land cover (the matrix). Objectives How does matrix composition influence the effect of FPS on biodiversity?. Methods Using an individual-based model to investigate the effect of different configurations of the matrix on the relationship between FPS and biodiversity of the focal-habitat. We manipulated the number and quality of land cover types in the matrix, and their similarity to the focal-habitat. Results Extremely different matrix, caused an order of magnitude stronger effect of FPS on alpha- and gamma-diversity and beta-diversity to decline. Low FPS led to high gamma-diversity. Increasing FPS caused a dramatic decline to low diversity. In contrast landscapes with a more similar matrix had lower diversity under low FPS declining little with increasing FPS. Having few matrix types caused beta-diversity to decline in general compared to landscapes with a larger numbers. Conclusions The effects of FPS on biodiversity may change depending on the number of matrix types and their similarity to the focal-habitat. We recommend that fragmentation studies should consider a greater variety of landscapes to help assess in which cases FPS does not have a negative impact and allow better predictions of the impacts of fragmentation. We show the importance of having a diversity of matrix land cover types and improving the hospitability of the matrix for species dependent on the focal-habitat.