“It’s really unjustifiable to be endangering a species for short-term economic gain.”

Awarded the 14th BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology, Lenore Fahrig explains in this interview how habitat fragmentation affects biodiversity and what factors determine species persistence in altered landscapes. Drawing on decades of research, she details how certain spatial patterns can mitigate—or exacerbate—the effects of habitat loss and why it is essential to integrate this knowledge into conservation policies. Her perspective offers a precise understanding of the relationships between territory, ecological connectivity, and population survival.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology has gone in this fourteenth edition to the ecologists Lenore Fahrig, Simon Levin and Steward Pickett for incorporating the spatial dimension into ecosystem research, in the sense of landscape and its multiple scales, and bringing it to bear in the management of “coupled human-natural systems,” in the words of the citation.