Landscape configuration and community structure jointly determine the persistence of mutualists under habitat loss

Habitat loss poses a major threat to biodiversity. Its effects on ecological communities depend on the complex interplay between the landscape configuration—the pattern of connections between habitat patches, the pattern of interactions between species, and habitat loss patterns. Despite their individual importance, their joint effect on species persistence remains poorly understood. We explore how these three factors influence the persistence of empirical mutualistic communities. By employing spatially explicit metacommunity models, we find that landscapes with a heterogeneous distribution of connections between habitat patches exhibit high persistence under spatially uncorrelated habitat loss but are highly vulnerable to spatially correlated loss, where adjacent habitat patches are destroyed sequentially. Homogeneous landscapes with regularly arranged patches have lower persistence than heterogeneous landscapes but are more robust to correlated habitat loss. The nested structure of metacommunities enhances species persistence, with varying magnitude depending on landscape configuration and the patterns of habitat loss. These findings can help guide conservation strategies by identifying landscape and community features that promote species persistence.