Neighborhood habitat gains increase plant species richness in forest fragments

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Theory and indirect evidence suggest that when new habitat is added to a habitat fragment’s local landscape, or “neighborhood”, species richness in the fragment will increase. Although this hypothesis is frequently assumed, it has not yet been tested directly with longitudinal data. In a natural forest regeneration experiment on Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, we use causal inference to show that 41-year changes in fragment-scale understory plant species richness are driven by changes in neighborhood habitat over the past century. This result supports theoretical predictions and highlights avenues for further research. Our findings can help inform prioritization of habitat restoration and conservation efforts. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2T939 Life Sciences habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, habitat restoration, habitat connectivity, habitat connectance, habitat amount, historical ecology, re-survey, forests, Aotearoa, New Zealand Published: 2025-05-23 22:25 Last Updated: 2025-05-23 22:25 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Data and Code Availability Statement: All data and R scripts are available at https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.11193308. Language: English