ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
The biggest losers: habitat isolation deconstructs complex food webs from top to bottom.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Past subarctic marine food web shifts recovered by sedaDNA and network analysis.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Biotic interactions biogeography: A framework for understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity patterns across scales.PLoS biology · 2026Review
- Food Web Similarity Increases With Productivity Similarity at a Continental Scale.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Mixed effects of protected areas on avian food webs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- A Mechanistic Approach to Animal Dispersal-Quantifying Energetics and Maximum Distances.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Landscape configuration can flip species-area relationships in dynamic meta-food-webs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Counteractive effects of predator invasion and habitat destruction on predator-prey systems.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Local and landscape factors shape alpha and beta trophic interaction diversity in urban gardens.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- How artificial light at night may rewire ecological networks: concepts and models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Parasite diversity at isolated, disturbed hydrothermal vents.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Predicting movement speed of beetles from body size and temperature.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- The travel speeds of large animals are limited by their heat-dissipation capacities.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Perturbation responses in co-evolved model meta-communities.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Spatial autocorrelation of local patch extinctions drives recovery dynamics in metacommunities.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Insights from the rescue and breeding management of Cuvier's gazelle (Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Habitat isolation reduces intra- and interspecific biodiversity and stability.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Habitat loss estimation for assessing terrestrial mammalian species extinction risk: an open data framework.PeerJ · 2022Article
- Functional diversity buffers the effects of a pulse perturbation on the dynamics of tritrophic food webs.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Metapopulation capacity determines food chain length in fragmented landscapes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Landscape heterogeneity buffers biodiversity of simulated meta-food-webs under global change through rescue and drainage effects.Nature communications · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Habitat fragmentation threatens global biodiversity. To date, there is only limited understanding of how the different aspects of habitat fragmentation (habitat loss, number of fragments and isolation) affect species diversity within complex ecological networks such as food webs. Here, we present a dynamic and spatially explicit food web model which integrates complex food web dynamics at the local scale and species-specific dispersal dynamics at the landscape scale, allowing us to study the interplay of local and spatial processes in metacommunities. We here explore how the number of habitat patches, i.e. the number of fragments, and an increase of habitat isolation affect the species diversity patterns of complex food webs (α-, β-, γ-diversities). We specifically test whether there is a trophic dependency in the effect of these two factors on species diversity. In our model, habitat isolation is the main driver causing species loss and diversity decline. Our results emphasize that large-bodied consumer species at high trophic positions go extinct faster than smaller species at lower trophic levels, despite being superior dispersers that connect fragmented landscapes better. We attribute the loss of top species to a combined effect of higher biomass loss during dispersal with increasing habitat isolation in general, and the associated energy limitation in highly fragmented landscapes, preventing higher trophic levels to persist. To maintain trophic-complex and species-rich communities calls for effective conservation planning which considers the interdependence of trophic and spatial dynamics as well as the spatial context of a landscape and its energy availability.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.