Species persistence decreases with habitat fragmentation: an analysis in periodic stochastic environments

Lionel Roques (1) , Radu S. Stoica (2)

1 BioSP - Biostatistique et Processus Spatiaux
2 LPP - Laboratoire Paul Painlevé - UMR 8524

This paper presents a study of a nonlinear reaction-diffusion population model in fragmented environments. The model is set on $\R^N$, with periodic heterogeneous coefficients obtained using stochastic processes. Using a criterion of species persistence based on the notion of principal eigenvalue of an elliptic operator, we provided a precise numerical analysis of the interactions between habitat fragmentation and species persistence. The obtained results clearly indicated that species persistence strongly tends to decrease with habitat fragmentation. Moreover, comparing two stochastic models of landscape pattern generation, we observed that in addition to local fragmentation, a more global effect of the position of the habitat patches also influenced species persistence.

Mots clés: Reaction-diffusion; Species conservation; Fragmentation; Stochastic landscape models; Gibbs measures

Domaines: Equations aux dérivées partielles [math.AP]; Biodiversité et Ecologie

Lionel Roques, Radu S. Stoica. Species persistence decreases with habitat fragmentation: an analysis in periodic stochastic environments. 2007. ⟨hal-00149539⟩