Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, Fractal landscapes, and heterogeneity

A pretentious title of sorts, but... I was reading through "the effect of landscape structure on community self-organization and critical biodiversity" (With 2004), which is quite interesting, and noticed a connection between her landscape structure creations and disturbance maps. Her fractal landscapes (ranging from random to highly ordered) look just like different disturbance maps, corresponding to small, frequent disturbances to rare, large disturbances. The connection wasn't made in her paper, but it's still kind of cool. Then, thinking about how landscape biodiversity is usually a simple function of the amount of habitat available, I put together a graph combining those two ideas, mostly for myself to try and clarify the relationship. Hopefully it makes sense. The boxes on the left show the types of habitat in the different setups, I didn't indicate edge on the two lower ones, but they are there. It requires not thinking about edges as "effected interior habitat," but rather considering them unique habitat in their own right, which is a fair statement, I imagine. Second, all of those boxes on the left are supposed to have the same amount of black and white (before edges are taken into account) so there's no change in the amount of habitat before edges from highly clumped (top) to highly fragmented (bottom). This would also place Kendi's invasibility work right in the middle too.

Note that landscape heterogeneity peaks in the middle. Forgot to put that line in.



Now that I post that, I think it's probably a pretty trivial and obvious relationship. But... it's there now, and I need to go vote, so it's staying up. Cheers.