Higher trophic levels and species with poorer dispersal traits are more susceptible to habitat loss on island fragments.

Abstract

Ongoing habitat loss and fragmentation caused by human activities represent one of the greatest causes of biodiversity loss. However, the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation are not felt equally among species. Here, we examined how habitat loss influenced the diversity and abundance of species from different trophic levels, with different traits, by taking advantage of an inadvertent experiment that created habitat islands from a once continuous forest via the creation of the Thousand Island Lake, a large reservoir in China. On 28 of these islands with more than a 9000-fold difference in their area (0.12-1154 ha), we sampled plants, herbivorous insects, and predatory insects using effort-controlled sampling and analyses. This allowed us to discern whether any observed differences in species diversity were due to passive sampling alone or to demographic effects that disproportionately influenced some species relative to others. We found that while most metrics of sampling effort-controlled diversity increased with island area, the strength of the effect was exacerbated for species in higher trophic levels. When we more explicitly examined differences in species composition among islands, we found that the pairwise difference in species composition among islands was dominated by species turnover but that nestedness increased with differences in island area, indicating that some species are more likely to be absent from smaller islands. Furthermore, by examining trends of several dispersal-related traits of species, we found that species with lower dispersal propensity tended to be those that were lost from smaller islands, which was observed for herbivorous and predatory insects. Our results emphasize the importance of incorporating within-patch demographic effects, as well as the taxa and traits of species when understanding the influence of habitat loss on biodiversity.