Ricerc@Sapienza

Although habitat fragmentation is often assumed to be a primary driver of extinction, global patterns of fragmentation and its relationship to extinction risk have not been consistently quantified for any major animal taxon. We developed high-resolution habitat fragmentation models and used phylogenetic comparative methods to quantify the effects of habitat fragmentation on the world's terrestrial mammals, including 4,018 species across 26 taxonomic Orders.

1. As predator and parasitoid insects depend on multiple resources for adult feeding and reproduction, environmental heterogeneity (EH) is expected to be a key driver of their species diversity. In temperate regions, the benefits of EH are expected to vary across spatial scales and seasons, depending on species life-history traits and temporal fluctuations in resources. 2. We tested the importance of EH at multiple spatial scales on diversity and abundance of predator and parasitoid insects, and whether its effects changed across seasons.