The macroecology of landscape ecology

Abstract

One of landscape ecology's main goals is to unveil how biodiversity is impacted by habitat transformation. However, the discipline suffers from significant context dependency in observed spatial and temporal trends, hindering progress towards understanding the mechanisms driving species declines and preventing the development of accurate estimates of future biodiversity change. Here, we discuss recent evidence that populations' and species' responses to habitat change at the landscape scale are modulated by factors and processes occurring at macroecological scales, such as historical disturbance rates, distance to geographic range edges, and climatic suitability. We suggest that placing landscape ecology studies in a macroecological lens will help to explain seemingly inconsistent results and will ultimately create better predictive models to help mitigate the biodiversity crisis.

Keywords: biodiversity models; centre–periphery hypothesis; drivers of biodiversity loss; extinction-filter hypothesis; physiological tolerance hypothesis.