Deforestation is an important factor in the global biodiversity crisis. As we lose forest habitat across the world, the remaining forests become more fragmented, which as we learned, makes it more difficult for species count to persist due to island biogeography theory. We also learned that fragmentation decreases gene flow which leads to less resistant populations and threats like inbreeding. This article from Nature explains that there isn't much research tracking how fragmentation directly affects biodiversity over time in an environment, but rather that these ideas we have about fragmentation come from studying different habitats with separate levels of fragmentation and comparing their biodiversity indices. They also explain some of the problems with popular biodiversity indices, especially when using them to compare different landscapes. The article presents a recent study that aimed to give us a better understanding of the relationship between fragmentation and biodiversity by establishing a standardized metric for diversity gradients that accounts for factors like how spread out the fragments being compared are within a region. Taking this new approach, the study found a decrease in all three diversity metrics we learned about (alpha, beta, gamma). This is consistent with previous findings except for the beta diversity which has usually been found to be higher in fragmented regions. While it's been argued that separated fragments could lead to this higher species uniqueness, this study saw that effect go away when they corrected for size of the region since fragmented regions tend to be bigger than connected regions. I think this last point is especially important for understanding how fragmentation works. It rejects the idea that fragmentation can have any positive effects on diversity and I think this correction should be done in any future analyses that aim to compare the biodiversity of differently fragmented regions to one another. The main weakness in this study is that it still doesn't show us how biodiversity changes over time with fragmentation. That kind of analysis would be expensive and time consuming, but would have likely revealed this same bias in our previous understanding and potentially other limitations of comparing different regions.