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

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.