Beyond the fragmentation debate in forest planning: how do habitat amount and spatial arrangement matter for saproxylic beetle diversity?

In managed forests, intensive silvicultural practices reduce the density/diversity of deadwood and tree microhabitats at the forest stand scale. This negatively affects biodiversity, especially saproxylic beetles which dependent upon these old-growth attributes. At the landscape scale, forest management plans lead to a spatial heterogeneity of these attributes which can be perceived as a source of fragmentation by many saproxylic species. However, the influence of saproxylic resources distribution at large scales received little attention to date. More particularly, the relative importance of quantity vs. fragmentation per se (spatial configuration of resources independently from quantity) …