Jacobs Jamaal, Salmaniw Yurij, Lam King-Yeung, Zhai Lu, Wang Hao, Zhang Bo
Department of Integrative Biology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA.
Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Conserv Biol. 2025 Jun;39(3):e14424. doi: 10.1111/cobi.14424. Epub 2024 Dec 19.
Habitat loss and fragmentation have independent impacts on biodiversity; thus, field studies are needed to distinguish their impacts. Moreover, species with different locomotion rates respond differently to fragmentation, complicating direct comparisons of the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation across differing taxa and landscapes. To overcome these challenges, we combined mechanistic mathematical modeling and laboratory experiments to compare how species with different locomotion rates were affected by low (∼80% intact) and high (∼30% intact) levels of habitat loss. In our laboratory experiment, we used Caenorhabditis elegans strains with different locomotion rates and subjected them to the different levels of habitat loss and fragmentation by placing Escherichia coli (C. elegans food) over different proportions of the Petri dish. We developed a partial differential equation model that incorporated spatial and biological phenomena to predict the impacts of habitat arrangement on populations. Only species with low rates of locomotion declined significantly in abundance as fragmentation increased in areas with low (p = 0.0270) and high (p = 0.0243) levels of habitat loss. Despite that species with high locomotion rates changed little in abundance regardless of the spatial arrangement of resources, they had the lowest abundance and growth rates in all environments because the negative effect of fragmentation created a mismatch between the population distribution and the resource distribution. Our findings shed new light on incorporating the role of locomotion in determining the effects of habitat fragmentation.
栖息地丧失和破碎化对生物多样性有着独立的影响；因此，需要进行实地研究来区分它们的影响。此外，具有不同移动速度的物种对破碎化的反应不同，这使得跨不同分类群和景观直接比较栖息地丧失和破碎化的影响变得复杂。为了克服这些挑战，我们将机理数学建模和实验室实验相结合，以比较不同移动速度的物种如何受到低水平（约80%完整）和高水平（约30%完整）栖息地丧失的影响。在我们的实验室实验中，我们使用了具有不同移动速度的秀丽隐杆线虫菌株，并通过在培养皿的不同比例区域放置大肠杆菌（秀丽隐杆线虫的食物），使其经历不同水平的栖息地丧失和破碎化。我们开发了一个包含空间和生物现象的偏微分方程模型，以预测栖息地布局对种群的影响。在低水平（p = 0.0270）和高水平（p = 0.0243）栖息地丧失的区域，随着破碎化增加，只有移动速度低的物种数量显著下降。尽管移动速度高的物种数量无论资源的空间布局如何变化都不大，但它们在所有环境中的数量和增长率最低，因为破碎化的负面影响导致了种群分布与资源分布之间的不匹配。我们的研究结果为纳入移动在确定栖息地破碎化影响中的作用提供了新的见解。
