Fig. 5: Simulations targeting habitat types.

a–e represent simulations for singular habitat type extinction scenarios (agroecosystem: yellow, grassland: bright green, aquatic: blue, forest: dark green, wetland: purple) and the random model (black). In each subfigure, the left panels represent the number of cumulative secondary extinctions as a function of the number of primary extinctions. On these panels, curves represent the median of 1000 simulations, the darker ribbons represent the interquartile range, and the lighter ribbons the 95th percentile confidence interval for montanes (above) and lowlands (below) in the Northern Alps biogeographic region. The grey boxes represent the part of the simulation in which species within the targeted habitat type have all been removed. From this point onwards, the simulation is fully random until all species have been removed from the food web. The right panels of the subfigures represent violin boxplots of the robustness coefficient for each extinction scenario and the adjusted p-values for the pairwise Dunn tests and Cliff’s delta effect sizes. The violin plots visualise the distributions of the data points, each representing the outcome of one simulation.