Abstract

Understanding the influence of surrounding landscape structure on local habitat quality is necessary tocomplement the modelling of empirical relationships between habitat quality and species distributionpatterns. Traditional models explain patterns of biodiversity as a function of 'habitat amount in thelandscape', irrespective of spatially-explicit variation in habitat fragmentation or habitat quality, implicitlyignoring the interdependence between spatial components of land-use change. The contrastinghypothesis-that local habitat units are not interchangeable because their habitat attributes are dependent onvariation in surrounding habitat structure at both patch and landscape levels-was tested using ahierarchical causal modelling approach. Suchmodels are observation-intensive, so we generated fine-grained measures of habitat patch internal heterogeneities (proxies for habitat quality) from very highresolution Earth Observation images over multiple spatial extents. The results demonstrate the causaldependence of local habitat quality on surrounding patch and landscape context, and indicate that theinfluence of landscape pattern on habitat structure can be mediated by the cross-level dependenciesbetween landscape and patch attributes. From thespatial context dependence of habitat quality, weconclude that a substantial degree ofinterdependence among habitat effectsis likely to be the normindetermining theecological consequences of habitat fragmentation.

Autore Pugliese

• Lovergine Francesco

Tutti gli autori

• P. Mairota; B. Cafarelli; R. Labadessa; F.P. Lovergine; C. Tarantino; H. Nagendra; R.K. Didham

Titolo volume/Rivista

Non Disponibile

Anno di pubblicazione

2014

ISSN

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ISBN

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Numero di citazioni Wos

Nessuna citazione

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Numero di citazioni Scopus

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Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Settori ERC

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Codici ASJC

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