scholarly journals Area modulates the effect of elevation but not of land use or canopy on tropical plant species richness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Hemp ◽  
Corina Del Fabbro ◽  
Markus Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Species Richness ◽  
Tropical Forests ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Habitat Type ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Tropical Regions ◽  
Tropical Plant ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Elevational Range

AbstractOne of the few general patterns in ecology is the increase of species richness with area. However, factors driving species-area relationship (SAR) are under debate, and the role of human-induced changes has been overlooked so far. Furthermore, SAR studies in tropical regions, in particular in multilayered rain forests are scarce. On the other side, studies of global change-induced impacts on biodiversity have become increasingly important, particular in the tropics, where these impacts are especially pronounced. Here, we investigated if area modulates the effect of land use, elevation and canopy on plant species richness. For the first time we studied SAR in multilayered tropical forests considering all functional groups. We selected 13 natural and disturbed habitats on Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, distributed over an elevational range of 3700 m. In each habitat type, we set up three to six modified Whittaker plots. We recorded all plant species in 64 plots and 640 subplots and described SAR using the power function. Area consistently modulated effects of elevation on plant species richness, partly effects of land use but not effects of plant canopy. Thus, area needs to be taken into account when studying elevational plant species richness patterns. In contrast to temperate regions open and forest habitats did not differ in SAR, probably due to a distinct vertical vegetation zonation in tropical forests. Therefore, it is important to consider all vegetation layers including epiphytes when studying SAR in highly structured tropical regions.

scholarly journals Land use intensity, rather than plant species richness, affects the leaching risk of multiple nutrients from permanent grasslands

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (7) ◽  
pp. 2828-2840 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin H. Klaus ◽  
Till Kleinebecker ◽  
Verena Busch ◽  
Markus Fischer ◽  
Norbert Hölzel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Species Richness ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Land Use Intensity ◽  
Leaching Risk

Spatio-temporal patterns along a primary succession on alluvial sediments

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 888-897
Author(s):  
Maša Ignjatović ◽  
Mitja Kaligarič ◽  
Sonja Škornik ◽  
Danijel Ivajnšič
Keyword(s):  
Species Richness ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Primary Succession ◽  
Riparian Forest ◽  
Habitat Type ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Anthropogenic Pressures ◽  
Artificial Lake ◽  
White Willow ◽  
Successional Stages

AbstractDynamic alluvial landscapes offer many possibilities to study primary succession processes on newly developed habitats. However, within the Central European environmental conditions, where watercourses and their riparian spaces are under severe anthropogenic pressures — water regulation, deforestation, lowering of groundwater — natural processes are limited. We studied primary succession on alluvial stream deposits in an artificial lake, where we aimed to follow the terrestrialisation rate and habitat turnover, along with plant species richness and composition across successional stages. In 30 years, a pristine white-willow riparian forest developed. One half of the initially aquatic habitat became terrestrial. The frequency of change, studied on 11250 quadrats 10×10 m each (on a scale from “no change” to 8 changes) and the mean of change per habitat type (most of the habitats changed 2 to 3 times) revealed only one successional trajectory. The percentage flow chart showed a deterministic pathway of succession. The “time since formation” of a terrestrial habitat shows that more than 20% of the lake was terrestrialised within in the first ten years. We studied species richness and composition along three composed transects, following successional stages. We found that the newly assembled riparian white willow woodland has a surprisingly low colonisation rate of plant species.

scholarly journals The global distribution of diet breadth in insect herbivores

2014 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Forister ◽  
Vojtech Novotny ◽  
Anna K. Panorska ◽  
Leontine Baje ◽  
Yves Basset ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Species Richness ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Latitudinal Gradient ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Diet Breadth ◽  
Global Distribution ◽  
Herbivorous Insects ◽  
Insect Herbivore ◽  
Tropical Regions ◽  
Resource Specialization

Understanding variation in resource specialization is important for progress on issues that include coevolution, community assembly, ecosystem processes, and the latitudinal gradient of species richness. Herbivorous insects are useful models for studying resource specialization, and the interaction between plants and herbivorous insects is one of the most common and consequential ecological associations on the planet. However, uncertainty persists regarding fundamental features of herbivore diet breadth, including its relationship to latitude and plant species richness. Here, we use a global dataset to investigate host range for over 7,500 insect herbivore species covering a wide taxonomic breadth and interacting with more than 2,000 species of plants in 165 families. We ask whether relatively specialized and generalized herbivores represent a dichotomy rather than a continuum from few to many host families and species attacked and whether diet breadth changes with increasing plant species richness toward the tropics. Across geographic regions and taxonomic subsets of the data, we find that the distribution of diet breadth is fit well by a discrete, truncated Pareto power law characterized by the predominance of specialized herbivores and a long, thin tail of more generalized species. Both the taxonomic and phylogenetic distributions of diet breadth shift globally with latitude, consistent with a higher frequency of specialized insects in tropical regions. We also find that more diverse lineages of plants support assemblages of relatively more specialized herbivores and that the global distribution of plant diversity contributes to but does not fully explain the latitudinal gradient in insect herbivore specialization.

Semi-natural grassland continuity, long-term land-use change and plant species richness in an agricultural landscape on Öland, Sweden

2008 ◽  
Vol 84 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 200-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotten J. Johansson ◽  
Karin Hall ◽  
Honor C. Prentice ◽  
Margareta Ihse ◽  
Triin Reitalu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Species Richness ◽  
Land Use Change ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Agricultural Landscape ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Natural Grassland

Plant species richness in grasslands: the relative importance of contemporary environment and land-use history since the Iron Age

Ecography ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 569-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Henrik Bruun ◽  
Bo Fritzbøger ◽  
Per Ole Rindel ◽  
Ulla Lund Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Species Richness ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Land Use History ◽  
Relative Importance

scholarly journals On the relationship between farmland biodiversity and land-use intensity in Europe

2008 ◽  
Vol 276 (1658) ◽  
pp. 903-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
D Kleijn ◽  
F Kohler ◽  
A Báldi ◽  
P Batáry ◽  
E.D Concepción ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Species Richness ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Conservation Strategies ◽  
Land Use Intensity ◽  
N Input ◽  
Arable Fields ◽  
Relative Cover

Worldwide agriculture is one of the main drivers of biodiversity decline. Effective conservation strategies depend on the type of relationship between biodiversity and land-use intensity, but to date the shape of this relationship is unknown. We linked plant species richness with nitrogen (N) input as an indicator of land-use intensity on 130 grasslands and 141 arable fields in six European countries. Using Poisson regression, we found that plant species richness was significantly negatively related to N input on both field types after the effects of confounding environmental factors had been accounted for. Subsequent analyses showed that exponentially declining relationships provided a better fit than linear or unimodal relationships and that this was largely the result of the response of rare species (relative cover less than 1%). Our results indicate that conservation benefits are disproportionally more costly on high-intensity than on low-intensity farmland. For example, reducing N inputs from 75 to 0 and 400 to 60 kg ha −1  yr −1 resulted in about the same estimated species gain for arable plants. Conservation initiatives are most (cost-)effective if they are preferentially implemented in extensively farmed areas that still support high levels of biodiversity.

scholarly journals Determinants of Termite Assemblages’ Characteristics within Natural Habitats of a Sudano-Guinean Savanna (Comoe National Park, Côte d’Ivoire)

Insects ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 189
Author(s):  
N’golo Koné ◽  
Kolotchèlèma Silué ◽  
Souleymane Konaté ◽  
Karl Linsenmair
Keyword(s):  
Species Richness ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Environmental Variables ◽  
National Park ◽  
Woody Plant ◽  
Habitat Type ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
Termite Species ◽  
Woody Plant Species

Termites are one of the major components of tropical ecosystems. However, the ecological and biological variables determining the structure of their communities within natural habitats are less documented in general and especially in the Comoe National Park, a Sudano-Guinean savanna zone located in the north-eastern part of Côte d’Ivoire (West Africa). Using a standardized method of belt transects, the structure of termite’s communities was estimated within habitats differing in the structure of their vegetation, soil characteristics, and the disturbance level caused by annual occurrences of bushfires. The effect of a set of environmental variables (habitat type, occurrence of annual bushfire, woody plant density, woody plant species richness, and soil physicochemical parameters) was tested on the habitat-specific recorded termite species. Sixty species of termites belonging to 19 genera, seven subfamilies and two families, namely Rhinotermitidae (Coptotermitinae and Rhinotermitinae) and Termitidae (Apicotermitinae, Cubitermitinae, Macrotermitinae, Nasutitermitinae, and Termitinae) were sampled. These species were assigned to the four feeding groups of termites: fungus growers (18 species), wood feeders (17 species), soil feeders (19 species) and the grass feeders (6 species). The highest diversity of termites was encountered in forest habitats, with 37 and 34, respectively, for the gallery forest and the forest island. Among savanna habitats, the woodland savanna was identified as the most diversified habitat with 32 recorded species, followed by the tree savanna (28 species) and the grassy savanna (17 species). The distribution of termite species and their respective feedings groups was determined by the habitat type and a set of environmental variables such as Woody Plant Diversity (WPD), Woody plant Families Diversity (WPFD), and Organic Carbon (OC). The annual Fire Occurrence (FO) was found to indirectly impact the characteristics of termite assemblages within natural habitats via their respective Herbaceous Species Richness (HSR) and Woody Plant Species Richness (WPSR). In summary, the spatial heterogeneity of the Comoe National Park, modeled by the uncontrolled annual bushfire, offers a diversified natural habitat with an important variety of termite-habitat-specific species, probably due to the food preference of these organisms and its relatively good conservation status.

scholarly journals Consequences of land-use change and the wildfire disaster of 2017 for the central Chilean biodiversity hotspot

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Ch. Braun ◽  
Fabian Faßnacht ◽  
Diego Valencia ◽  
Maximiliano Sepulveda
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Species Richness ◽  
Land Use Change ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Habitat Loss ◽  
Plant Species Richness ◽  
Biodiversity Hotspot ◽  
Anthropogenic Pressure ◽  
Biodiversity Hotspots ◽  
Central Chile

AbstractCentral Chile is an important biodiversity hotspot in Latin America. Biodiversity hotspots are characterised by a high number of endemic species cooccurring with a high level of anthropogenic pressure. In central Chile, the pressure is caused by land-use change, in which near-natural primary and secondary forests are replaced and fragmented by commercial pine and eucalyptus plantations. Large forest fires are another factor that can potentially endanger biodiversity. Usually, environmental hazards, such as wildfires, are part of the regular environmental dynamic and not considered a threat to biodiversity. Nonetheless, this situation may change if land-use change and altered wildfire regimes coerce. Land-use change pressure may destroy landscape integrity in terms of habitat loss and fragmentation, while wildfires may destroy the last remnants of native forests. This study aims to understand the joint effects of land-use change and a catastrophic wildfire on habitat loss and habitat fragmentation of local plant species richness hotspots in central Chile. To achieve this, we apply a combination of ecological fieldwork, remote sensing, and geoprocessing to estimate the spread and spatial patterns of biodiverse habitats under current and past land-use conditions and how these habitats were altered by land-use change and by a single large wildfire event. We show that land-use change has exceeded the wildfire’s impacts on diverse habitats. Despite the fact that the impact of the wildfire was comparably small here, wildfire may coerce with land-use change regarding pressure on biodiversity hotspots. Our findings can be used to develop restoration concepts, targeting on an increase of habitat diversity within currently fire-cleared areas and evaluate their benefits for plant species richness conservation.

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