Abstract:Habitat destruction is the primary cause of population, metapopulation and species extinction worldwide. The speeds of habitat destruction and species extinction reach the climax during the past 200 years because of rapid human population growth and advances in technology. The growing rates of this destructive process urge the development of a conceptual framework aiming at understanding the responses of ecosystems to habitat destruction. Many metapopulation models have simulated the consequences of habitat destruction on species diversity and gained many developments. However, those models focus on the effects of instantaneous destruction on species extinction and metapopulation dynamics and ignore the temporal heterogeneity of habitat destruction. So, we have developed a new universal non-autonomous dynamical model of multiple species competition-coexistence, and simulated the responses of species diversity to the temporal heterogeneity of habitat destruction at different rates. The results show that: 1) there is not only the extinction of superior competitors ranked from the best to the poorest, but also the extinction of inferior competitors from the poorest to the best. Moreover, extinction of inferior competitors can be further classified into two types: one is the short-time and mass extinction of inferior competitors, the other is the long-time extinction of inferior competitors from the poorest to the best. 2) The slower habitat destruction is, the more favorable it is to species persistence; 3) when q （abundance of the best competitor）is bigger, the most superior competitors are more vulnerable to extinction; when q is smaller, the most superior competitors and the most inferior competitors are both vulnerable to extinction.