Landscape heterogeneity buffers biodiversity of meta-food-webs under global change through rescue and drainage effects

Summary The impacts of habitat fragmentation and eutrophication on biodiversity have been studied in different scientific realms. Metacommunity research 1–5 has shown that reduction in landscape connectivity may cause biodiversity loss in fragmentated landscapes. Food-web research addressed how eutrophication increases biomass accumulations at high trophic levels causing the breakdown of local biodiversity 6–9 . However, there is very limited understanding of their cumulative impacts as they could amplify or cancel each other. Here, we show with simulations of meta-food-webs that landscape heterogeneity provides a buffering capacity against increasing nutrient eutrophication. An interaction between eutrophication and landscape homogenization precipitates the decline of biodiversity. We attribute our results to two complementary mechanisms related to source and sink dynamics. First, the “rescue effect” maintains local biodiversity by rapid recolonization after a local crash in population densities. Second, the “drainage effect” allows a more uniform spreading of biomass across the landscape, reducing overall interaction strengths and therefore stabilizing dynamics. In complex food webs on large spatial networks of habitat patches, these effects yield systematically higher biodiversity in heterogeneous than in homogeneous landscapes. Our meta-food-web approach reveals a strong interaction between habitat fragmentation and eutrophication and provides a mechanistic explanation of how landscape heterogeneity promotes biodiversity.