Rapid Diversity Loss of Competing Animal Species in Well-Connected Landscapes
Fig 4
Number of surviving species out of 21 interacting species over time in a meta-community model at different fragmentation levels (scale) and competitive settings. The landscape consists of 100 randomly distributed habitat patches of different sizes (B-F) or a merged patch with equal area (A) at 6 connectivity levels (scales).
Merged patch: all habitat of the 100 patches is combined into one single large patch of 50 km2, scale = 1: the patch density of 100 patches is on average 0.5 patches km-2 in a landscape of 14.1 x 14.1 km2. When the scale = 4, the 100 patches having the same size are randomly distributed in an area of 4*14.1 x 4*14.1 km2. Different lines represent the number of surviving species at different competitive settings.