Habitat fragmentation is a potentially critical factor in determining population persistence.
The habitat is divided into patches that are either suitable or not. Suitable patches are either occupied or unoccupied, and change states depending on colonization and mortality rates. The population goes extinct when the number of suitable patches falls below a critical threshold, which is a function of the local mortality and colonization rates. To assess how the spatial arrangement of patches affects these results, we translated the patch-occupancy model into a stochastic cellular automata. Fractal arrangements of suitable and unsuitable patches were used to simulate habitat fragmentation.