Population dynamics in highly fragmented landscapes

It's important to study how populations respond to changes in habitat distribution in landscapes. In this project, we use numerical methods to simulate reaction-diffusion equations in artificial binary landscapes with different structural distributions of the same habitat amount. We discuss the net effects of fragmentation into the steady total population in those landscapes. These effects are dependent on matrix hostility and we analyse 3 different scenarios: soft, intermediate and hostile matrices. In soft matrices, highly fragmented landscapes support greater total populations compared to slightly fragmented landscapes - and the opposite is true for hostile matrices. Regarding conservation, highly fragmented landscapes eventually led to the extinction of species for a sufficiently hostile matrix in low HA. We compared statistical models to conclude those where the effects of fragmentation and HA are interdependent presented the best statistical descriptions of average abundance in landscapes. Our synthetic data supported that fragmentation effects are not negligible compared to habitat loss, and effects of fragmentation considering linear interdependence with HA and effects of fragmentation per se are similar in direction across the HA gradient. The model we present can generate synthetic data to elucidate patterns of the effects of fragmentation on the ecological value of landscapes.