Habitat fragmentation impacts mobility in a common and widespread woodland butterfly: do sexes respond differently?

The male and female probabilities of moving were considerably lower in the highly fragmented landscapes compared to the male probability of moving in fragmented agricultural and deciduous oak woodland landscapes. We also investigated whether, and to what extent, daily dispersal distance in the highly fragmented landscape was influenced by a set of landscape variables for both males and females, including distance to the nearest woodland, area of the nearest woodland, patch area and abundance of individuals in the patch. We found that daily movement distance decreased with increasing distance to the nearest woodland in both males and females. Daily distances flown by males were related to the area of the woodland capture site, whereas no such effect was observed for females.Overall, mobility was strongly reduced in the highly fragmented landscape, and varied considerably among landscapes with different spatial resource distributions. We interpret the results relative to different cost-benefit ratios of movements in fragmented landscapes.