Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 21, Issue 11, Pages 1620-1628Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.12958
Keywords
Connectivity; corridors; habitat fragmentation; metacommunities; predators; spiders; trophic subsidies
Categories
Funding
- NSF [DEB - 1050361]
- NSF-GRFP
- Department Of Energy, Aiken, South Carolina [DE-AI09-00SR2218]
- Division Of Environmental Biology [1354218] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Landscape corridors mitigate the negative effects of habitat fragmentation by increasing dispersal. Corridors also increase biodiversity in connected habitat fragments, suggestive of metacommunity dynamics. What is unknown in this case is the mechanisms through which metacommunity dynamics act. Working in a large-scale fragmentation experiment, we tested the effect of corridors on the movement of prey species and subsequent effects on predator nutrition (which we call trophic subsidies). We enriched plants of central patches with N-15, then measured delta N-15 in green lynx spiders, the most abundant insect predator, in patches that were either connected to or isolated from the enriched patch. We found that corridors increased prey movement, as they increased spider delta N-15 by 40% in connected patches. Corridors also improved spider body condition, increasing nitrogen relative to carbon. We suggest a novel mechanism, trophic subsidies, through which corridors may increase the stability or size of populations in connected landscapes.
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