To protect the countryside, promote city living: introducing a new metric ‘fragmented land per capita’

Construction of buildings and transport infrastructure is often an unavoidable driver of landscape fragmentation, disrupting ecological connectivity. This study quantifies landscape fragmentation across 39 European countries using the normalised effective mesh size (meff) with the ‘cutting out’ (CUT) procedure. We confirm the relevance of using the meff CUT indicator for measuring landscape fragmentation at the regional level by its strong linear correlation with road density and imperviousness density. Based on this measure, we further introduce the ‘fragmented land per capita’ metric as a proxy for land use efficiency to quantify the impact of anthropogenic pressure on landscape connectivity. Our analysis reveals an important and often overlooked finding regarding city living: while absolute fragmentation is highest in cities, city living is associated with markedly less fragmented land per capita than rural living. These findings highlight the need for targeted, context-specific land use policies and infrastructural planning to support European conservation frameworks.