Wild boar is increasingly establishing populations in the outskirts of European cities, with the largest German urban population occurring in Berlin. Related soil disturbance in grasslands is common and often considered as damage to biodiversity. However, it is unknown how animal and plant species in urban grasslands respond to wild boar activity - an important limitation for conservation management. We sampled plants, grasshoppers and sand lizards in 22 dry grasslands and measured wild boar activity. We show that plant diversity decreased with rooting intensity, but not species richness, endangered or specialist species. Relationships with animals were mostly positive. Grasshopper diversity, total richness and richness of endangered and specialist species were positively related to rooting, as was sand lizard abundance. These relationships contrast to mostly negative effects in the wild boar’s non-native range. This first multi-taxa study in a large city suggests that soil disturbance by wild boars is not necessarily a threat to biodiversity. An implication for conservation is to consider the context-dependence of biodiversity responses to wild boar activity. For dry grasslands, disturbed patches should be accepted in management plans rather than re-vegetated by seeding.
Urbanisation is known to change biodiversity patterns and plant-animal interactions such as pollination -a key ecological process. Floral traits like colour, size or UV-patterns are essential attractors for many pollinators. It is largely unknown, though, how the distribution of such floral traits within plant communities changes along an urbanisation gradient.This study aims to understand to which extent floral traits known to attract pollinators are filtered by urban environments. We used dry grassland, spanning a broad urbanisation gradient in the Berlin metropolitan area, Germany, as a model ecosystem and identified the distribution of plant traits related to bee-perceived flower colours, UV reflection and flower size in 47 grassland patches. We analysed how these traits were related to abiotic and biotic factors at different spatial scales.The most influent predictor was an abiotic factor measured at the landscape scale: the proportion of impervious surface, found to be positively related to UV-reflectance strength and floral UV patterns, but negatively to floral size diversity. At the local scale, abiotic factors showed an intermediary number of relationships. Temperature was negatively associated with the bee-colour 'green + UV-green' and with flower size. The light environment was negatively related to the same bee-colour and to floral size diversity. Biotic factors related to local pollinator communities were less important: species richness was negatively related to flower size, while proportion of bees to floral sizes diversity.This study shows that floral traits known to attract pollinators are mostly filtered by abiotic factors related to urbanisation (share of impervious surface) or the urban heat island (local temperature). Biotic factors related to local pollinator communities were less important. These results increase our functional understanding of plant-animal interactions in cities by illustrating how urban environments modulate the attractiveness of plant communities to pollinators by filtering for floral plant traits.
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