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Testing the habitat amount hypothesis and fragmentation effects for medium- and large-sized mammals in a biodiversity hotspot

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Abstract

Context

Habitat loss is widely recognized as the main driver of biodiversity loss around the globe, yet the effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity have been extensively debated in recent years.

Objectives

We used a robust dataset of medium and large-sized mammals to test (a) the Habitat Amount Hypothesis, which postulates that species richness can be mainly predicted by the total amount of habitat surrounding the sampling site, and (b) the effects of habitat fragmentation per se, which may be expected to be weak or mainly positive on species richness.

Methods

We compiled information on the occurrence of mammal species in 166 forest fragments across the Atlantic Forest. For each forest fragment, we extracted information on patch size, percentage of forest cover (a proxy for habitat amount), and edge density and number of fragments (fragmentation metrics). We related these metrics to mammalian richness considering separately for all species, forest-dependent species, disturbance-tolerant species, and different trophic guilds.

Results

All richness measures strongly declined with decreasing forest cover, yet were unaffected by patch size, number of patches and edge density. The only exception occurred with herbivore richness, which was affected by number of patches. However, we found fragmentation per se effects only for herbivore richness.

Conclusions

Our results show that mammal richness increased with habitat amount at the landscape, whereas habitat fragmentation per se had significant negative impacts on herbivores only. We therefore recommend maintaining highly forested landscapes and restoring severely deforested areas, being essential for ensuring high richness of mammals.

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Data will be available from the Figshare Repository.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Centre for Research and Conservation, Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp for the doctoral scholarship, the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz—(PROPP, 00220.1100.1840), The Rufford Foundation (24655-1) and Idea Wild for funding. E.C. thanks the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico for the productivity fellowship (306373/2018-1). We thank the anonymous reviewer and Victor Arroyo-Rodríguez for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the ms.

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  1. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia e Conservação da Biodiversidade, Departamento de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz – UESC, Rodovia Jorge Amado, km 16, Bairro Salobrinho, S/N, Bahia, CEP 45662-900, Brazil

    Elaine Rios, Maíra Benchimol & Eliana Cazetta

  2. Laboratório de Ecologia Espacial, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia – UFBA, Rua Barão de Jeremoabo, Campus de Ondina, Nº 668, Bahia, CEP 40170-115, Brazil

    Pavel Dodonov

  3. Centre for Research and Conservation, Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp, Koningin Astridplein 26, 2018, Antwerp, Belgium

    Elaine Rios & Kristel De Vleeschouwer

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  1. Elaine Rios
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Rios, E., Benchimol, M., Dodonov, P. et al. Testing the habitat amount hypothesis and fragmentation effects for medium- and large-sized mammals in a biodiversity hotspot. Landscape Ecol 36, 1311–1323 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01231-9

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