Patch occupancy of North American mammals: is patchiness in the eye of the beholder?

Aim Intraspecific variation in patch occupancy often is related to physical features of a landscape, such as the amount and distribution of habitat. However, communities occupying patchy environments typically exhibit non-random distributions in which local assemblages of species-poor patches are nested subsets of assemblages occupying more species-rich patches. Nestedness of local communities implies interspecific differ-ences in sensitivity to patchiness. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain interspecific variation in responses to patchiness within a community, including differ-ences in (1) colonization ability, (2) extinction proneness, (3) tolerance to disturbance, (4) sociality and (5) level of adaptation to prevailing environmental conditions. We used data on North American mammals to compare the performance of these ecological hypotheses and the physical landscape hypothesis. We then compared the best of these models against models that scaled landscape structure to ecologically relevant attributes of individual species. Location North America