Complex organism – environment feedbacks buffer species diversity against habitat fragmentation

An additional factor that is not as well studied, but potentially important is the ecological feedbacks between organisms and their local environment, whereby organisms modify the environment and aff ect the survival and reproduction of individuals that subsequently utilize the altered environment. Well-documented examples of organism – environment feedbacks include those between plants and soil conditions (Bever et al. 2012) and metabolic cross-feeding among microbial populations (Rozen et al. 2009, Harcombe 2010). Such feedbacks have long been a subject of ecological research, and an increasing number of studies indicate that they can infl uence a range of ecological phenomena, including the maintenance of species diversity (Odling-Smee et al. 2003, Bever et al. 2010), the trajectory of community succession (Kardol et al. 2006, Jiang and DeAngelis 2013), the generation of priority eff ects (Kardol et al. 2007), the spread of invasive species (Levine et al. 2006, Eppstein and Molofsky 2007), and the emergence of long-term transient community states (Fukami and Nakajima 2011, 2013). However, the role of organism – environment feedbacks is poorly understood in the context of habitat loss and fragmentation. In this paper, we use a spatially explicit individual-based model of plant communities to ask the following three questions. First, how do organism – environment feedbacks infl uence the extent of diversity loss following habitat Ecography 38: 370–379, 2015 doi: 10.1111/ecog.01027 © 2014 Th e Authors. Ecography © 2014 Nordic Society Oikos Subject Editor: Jens-Christian Svenning. Editor-in-Chief: Jens-Christian Svenning. Accepted 8 October 2014