Large, undisturbed forests are better for harboring biodiversity than fragmented landscapes, according to University of Michigan research.

Ecologists agree that habitat loss and the fragmentation of forests reduces biodiversity in the remaining fragments. But ecologists don’t agree whether it’s better to focus on preserving many smaller, fragmented tracts of land or larger, continuous landscapes. The study, published in Nature and led by U-M School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) ecologist Thiago Gonçalves-Souza, comes to a conclusion on the decades-long debate.

“The heart of the debate is that people who argue that fragmentation isn’t so bad say that because you have isolated habitats, you have different species composition, which means at a large scale, it’s good. If they are different, we can assume that the gamma diversity is going to be higher,” said Gonçalves-Souza, an assistant research scientist in SEAS’ Institute for Global Change Biology. “They say the opposite for large tracts of land: because this is a continuous and homogeneous patch, the species composition is too similar.”

The study: Species turnover does not rescue biodiversity in fragmented landscapes

Read the full press release on the Michigan News website.