The land between patches — cropland, pasture, suburb, or regenerating scrub — is the matrix. A soft matrix lets some species forage or disperse; a hard matrix of bare fields and traffic may block almost everyone.
Two forests of identical size can therefore differ wildly in extinction risk depending on what surrounds them. Improving matrix cover can substitute for missing formal corridors.
Fragments do not live in empty space. Matrix quality is the invisible habitat that decides if isolation on the map is isolation in real life.
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