Interspecific variation in ploidy as a key plant trait outlining local extinction risks and community patterns in fragmented landscapes

1. Polyploidy is associated with a plethora of phenotypic and genetic changes yielding transformative effects on species’ life-history and ecology. These biological attributes can contribute to the success of species on ecological timescales, as observed in the invasion success or rapid environmental and climatic adaptation of polyploids. However, to date there has been a distinct lack of empirical evidence linking species’ local extinction risk, species distributions and community structure in fragmented landscapes with interspecific variation in ploidy. 2. We aimed to investigate the relationship between levels of habitat fragmentation and patterns in both diversity and the frequency of species with different ploidy levels. We included additional persistence- and dispersal related life-history traits, to establish the relative importance of ploidy in determining species richness and frequencies following habitat fragmentation. We therefore collected plant community presence-absence da...