Habitat degradation destabilizes complex metacommunities by disrupting dispersal

Habitat degradation shifts metacommunities from stable to reactive and ultimately unstable dynamical regimes, with reactivity linked to elevated extinction risk under repeated disturbances.

• Why it matters: Classical stability criteria assume well-mixed communities, leaving uncertainty about how habitat loss and fragmentation affect stability in spatial, complex metacommunities.
• What they did: The authors built a metacommunity framework combining classical stability theory with spatial dynamics, analyzing responses to perturbations like drought or forest fire and varying dispersal patterns.
• The result: Dispersal reshapes stability transitions—converting unstable to reactive and reactive to stable—and fragmentation can be comparably effective to habitat loss in driving extinctions by shifting regimes.

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