Assessing biodiversity in fragmented landscapes using SLOSS comparisons
We used SLOSS comparisons (Quinn & Harrison 1988), which juxtapose two species-area accumulation curves generated from a metacommunity of species inhabiting a set of patches (Fig. 1-d). The two curves describe the cumulative number of species as a function of cumulative area, adding patches either from smallest to largest or from largest to smallest. From the relative position of the curves, one can infer that biodiversity increases with habitat fragmentation (small-to-large curve above large-to-small curve; SS > SL), decreases with fragmentation (large-to-small curve above small-to-large curve; SL > SS), or is unrelated to fragmentation (curves cross; SS = SL). This method for estimating effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity is conservative, because it identifies fragmentation effects only when they occur consistently across an entire dataset (Fahrig et al. 2019).