Answer:
connectivity
Explanation:
Natural and anthropogenic alterations affect the landscape. The unmeasurable use of the land for farming, cattle industry, buildings, among many other activities, has caused a severe fragmentation in the original landscape that has been seriously affecting biodiversity.
Fragmentation occurs when a big extension is transformed into many different and smaller patches, separated by another type of cover. You can imagine, for instance, an area used for mono-culturing, which you can see as a homogeneous space of the same texture and color, and small green islands of original vegetation dispersed in this cropped area. These small islands are separated from each other by the crop.
These alterations produce patches or tesserae in the landscape. Patches are relatively homogenous areas with well-defined borders and environmental characteristics very different from those of the surrounding areas. These are like islands. You can think about patches or tesserae as the remaining pieces or units of the original landscape dispersed inside an affected bigger-sized area.
Fragmentation generates a significant loss of physical continuity between the different areas of the original habitat. It might negatively affect biodiversity by decreasing patch sizes, completely isolating them from each other, and increasing the border effect.
Many species can not survive if they are not in the original habitat. Probably they do not find enough food or shelter, or they are very exposed to predation. So they need to stay in the patch. Most of these species are not even adapted to living on the border of the patches. Eventually, fragmented areas can not support some population species that end by dying because they can not survive for a long time in that reduced place. Patches are not suitable to support too many species.
For these reasons, the connection between islands becomes so important. To allow species to move from one place to the other, interact with other species, reproduce, find food, shelter, avoid predation. In other words, survive. Connectivity is how the territory makes possible individuals flow or genetic flow, between the different tesserae.
