Abstract
Understanding the ecological responses of organisms to habitat loss and fragmentation is essential for spatially explicit nature conservation plans in human-dominated landscapes. It is recognized that the greater the amount of habitat in a landscape, and the larger the habitat patches, the more diverse the ecological communities. Yet, the effects of the spatial arrangement of habitat areas, their fragmentation into small discontinuous patches and the adjacent spaces that form the landscape matrix still remain controversial. We approach these questions by investigating systems at different spatial scales in order to advance landscape ecology theory.
