  Population survival depends on a large set of factors that includes
environment structure. Due to landscape heterogeneity, species can occupy
particular regions that provide the ideal scenario for development, working as
a refuge from harmful environmental conditions. Survival occurs if population
growth overcomes the losses caused by adventurous individuals that cross the
patch edge. In this work, we consider a single species dynamics in a bounded
domain with a space-dependent diffusion coefficient. We investigate the impact
of heterogeneous diffusion on the minimal patch size that allows population
survival and show that, typically, this critical size is smaller than the one
for a homogeneous medium with the same average diffusivity.
