Nineteenth-century land use shapes the current occurrence of some plant species, but weakly affects the richness and total composition of Central European grasslands.
Gabriele Midolo, Hana Skokanová, Adam Thomas Clark, Marie Vymazalová, Milan Chytrý, Stefan Dullinger, Franz Essl, Jozef Šibík, Petr Keil
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Context: Historical land use is thought to have influenced plant community diversity, composition and function through the local persistence of taxa that reflect ecological conditions of the past.
Objectives: We tested for the effects of historical land use on contemporary plant species richness, composition, and ecological preferences in the grassland vegetation of Central Europe.
Methods: We analyzed 6975 vegetation plots sampled between 1946 and 2021 in dry, mesic, and wet grasslands in the borderland between Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Using 1819-1853 military maps, we assigned each plot to a historical land-use category (arable land, forest, grassland, settlement, permanent crop, and water body). We modeled the response of species richness, composition, and plant ecological preferences to the historical land use including contemporary covariates.
Results: Nineteenth-century land use explained little overall variation in species richness and composition, whereas more variation was explained by contemporary environmental conditions. However, we found that ecological preferences of some species were associated with specific historical land uses. Specifically, species more frequently occurring in historically forested grasslands showed lower light and disturbance frequency indicator values, while those associated with former settlements displayed higher disturbance severity indicator values.
Conclusions: We conclude that signatures of specific land-use conversions, including the restoration of grasslands in human-impacted areas, may still be detectable in grasslands even 200 years into the future. However, while local historical land use influences the occurrence of some species based on their ecological preferences, these effects do not significantly influence community species richness and total composition.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-024-02016-6.
期刊介绍：
Landscape Ecology is the flagship journal of a well-established and rapidly developing interdisciplinary science that focuses explicitly on the ecological understanding of spatial heterogeneity. Landscape Ecology draws together expertise from both biophysical and socioeconomic sciences to explore basic and applied research questions concerning the ecology, conservation, management, design/planning, and sustainability of landscapes as coupled human-environment systems. Landscape ecology studies are characterized by spatially explicit methods in which spatial attributes and arrangements of landscape elements are directly analyzed and related to ecological processes.
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