This week, on May 22^nd, we celebrate the biodiversity day. A celebration of the diversity of all living things. Although highly fragmented landscapes have less biodiversity than a more pristine, less fragmented areas, it still maintains biodiversity.

Something that a lot of people, including scientists and especially conservationists, seem to forget. One of the main characteristics of biodiversity is its resilience, this means its capacity to recover after a difficult event.

Living in a fragmented landscape means that the resources (food, mates, nesting sites, etc.) and space are reduced and altered in some way. Therefore, that fragmentation and loss of habitat are those difficult events for many species of plants and animals, that need to recover and persist even after the better condition of their habitat has been altered.

For monkeys, for example, this sometimes means living in smaller territories or to use not so friendly spaces to get where food is available, or to travel long distances to eat some special food or to find a new mate. It also means facing new predators and eat new foods.

For some plants these new conditions mean to grow in a place with more light than a particular plant is used to, or with more restriction, or competing with new species that they weren’t in contact before.

However, some of them have the capacity to recover and adapt to those new conditions and although in a simpler way to making the forest fragments to continue to function in an altered environment. These functioning forest fragments still give us, humans, some of the most important services that biodiversity provides. Without some of those services, such as clean water, oxygen, functional soils, pollinators our crops and livestock could not survive.

So, in this post, I want to share with you some images of that resilient biodiversity that still live and thrive in the highly fragmented landscape where I have the privilege of work for more than a decade.

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