Deficits of biodiversity and productivity linger a century after agricultural abandonment

Isbell, Forest; Tilman, David; Reich, Peter B.; Clark, Adam Thomas

doi:10.1038/s41559-019-1012-1

Cited by 121 publications

(132 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

117

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Studies of naturally regenerating forests show gradual recovery of native species compared to reference forests, but outcomes vary widely and species composition recovery is significantly slower than species richness (Chazdon et al 2009, Navarro and Pereira 2015, Acevedo-Charry and Aide 2019, Matos et al 2019, Rozendaal et al 2019. Agricultural land use can have a centuries-long legacy on the biodiversity and productivity of forest ecosystems derived from old-field succession (Isbell et al 2019). During the first 40 years of natural regeneration in temperate areas across the globe, organism abundance and diversity levels attained 133% and 82%, respectively, of reference forest levels (Meli et al 2017).…”

Section: Search Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fostering natural forest regeneration on former agricultural land through economic and policy interventions

Chazdon

Lindenmayer

Guariguata

et al. 2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

142

124

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Under suitable conditions, deforested land used for agricultural crops or pastures can revert to forest through the assisted or unassisted process of natural regeneration. These naturally regenerating forests conserve biodiversity, provide a wide array of ecosystem goods and services, and support rural economies and livelihoods. Based on studies in tropical and temperate forest ecosystems, we summarize cases where natural regeneration is occurring in agricultural landscapes around the world and identify the socio-ecological factors that favor its development and affect its qualities, outcomes and persistence. We describe how the economic and policy context creates barriers for the development, persistence, and management of naturally regenerating forests, including perverse outcomes of policies intended to enhance protection of native forests. We conclude with recommendations for specific economic and policy interventions at local, national, and global scales to enhance forest natural regeneration and to promote the sustainable management of regrowth forests on former agricultural land while strengthening rural communities and economies.

show abstract

Section: Search Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fostering natural forest regeneration on former agricultural land through economic and policy interventions

Chazdon

Lindenmayer

Guariguata

et al. 2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

142

124

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although road verges are not likely to be able to host the full diversity of species found in managed semi‐natural grassland habitat, it might be reasonable to expect that half a century or more in modern verges would suffice for communities to resemble those of historical road verges. However, spontaneous colonisation of target communities is generally slow and can take decades or more (Baasch, Kirmer, & Tischew, 2012; Isbell et al., 2019; Jírová, Klaudisová, & Prach, 2012), while other biologically valuable road‐verge habitats have been found to continue developing after more than 100 years (Spooner & Smallbone, 2009). For grassland communities, results from seed‐sowing experiments indicate that the slow build‐up of communities is due to dispersal and establishment limitation (Öster et al., 2009; Turley et al., 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We saw no influence of the historical landscape composition on current richness, indicating that historical road verges might already be stable in terms of biodiversity and not experiencing a so‐called extinction debt (Koyanagi et al., 2009; Krauss et al., 2010). On the other hand, modern road verges appear to still be in the colonisation and establishment phase and have the potential to develop and gain further species in the future (Isbell et al., 2019; Spooner & Smallbone, 2009). How many species could be gained is likely to depend on other factors such as road verge width, structure and road traffic intensity (Angold, 1997; Jimenez et al., 2013; Phillips et al., 2019), factors which can also covary with road age.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Time lags also occur in the other direction. When grassland habitat is (re‐)created or restored, it can take many years, decades or longer for target species and communities to establish at a new site (Isbell, Tilman, Reich, & Clark, 2019; Turley, Orrock, Ledvina, & Brudvig, 2017; Waldén & Lindborg, 2016). Studies on roadsides have shown that species richness reaches its maximum after 20 years in heavily degraded industrial landscapes (Zeng et al., 2011), while more shrubby and woody target vegetation is still developing after more than a century (Deckers, Becker, Honnay, Hermy, & Muys, 2005; Spooner & Lunt, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Roadside diversity in relation to age and surrounding source habitat: evidence for long time lags in valuable green infrastructure

Auffret

Lindgren

2020

Ecol Sol and Evidence

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

1. The severe and ongoing decline in semi‐natural grassland habitat during the past two centuries means that it is important to consider how other, marginal grassland habitat elements can contribute to landscape‐level biodiversity, and under what circumstances. 2. To examine how habitat age and the amount of core grassland habitat in the surrounding landscape affect diversity in green infrastructure, we carried out inventories of 36 rural road verges that were either historical (pre‐1901) or modern (established post‐1901 and before 1975), and were surrounded by relatively high (>15%) or low (<5%) levels of grassland habitat. We recorded the number of plant species, grassland specialists, grassland conservation species and the fraction of the landscape's species and specialists found in the road verge. 3. Road verge communities were characterised by high levels of grassland specialist species (35% of the 161 species recorded), with road verge sites supporting 15–20% of the specialist species found in the surrounding 25 km2 landscape. 4. Richness of species and specialists were more closely related to road age than to the amount of surrounding habitat. Higher diversity in historical roads, despite the majority of modern roads being at least 60 years old, suggests a long time lag in the establishment of grassland communities in marginal grassland habitats. We identified no effect of historical surrounding land use on present day diversity in road verges. 5. Road verge richness was not affected by the amount of surrounding grassland. This could be due to the relatively low amounts of grassland remaining in all landscapes, together with dispersal limitation commonly found in grassland plant communities contributing to a potential time lag. 6. We identified road verges as potentially very important habitats for grassland communities. Because of the high levels of grassland specialists present, these and other marginal grasslands and grassland green infrastructure should be explicitly considered in landscape‐scale conservation management. Practitioners looking to identify the most species‐rich road verges should aim to find the oldest possible, while long time lags in community assembly suggests that seed sowing could be appropriate to enhance roadside diversity, even in decades‐old road verges.

show abstract

“…However, forest loss events can occur at 150 multiple time points at a given geographic location. Forest loss occurring outside of the period of population or biodiversity monitoring might influence our ability to detect a causal link between forest loss and biodiversity change (16,38). For example, some sites experienced their largest reductions in forested areas over a century ago when we have very few ecological records.…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Landscape-scale forest loss as a catalyst of population and biodiversity change

Daskalova

Myers‐Smith

Bjorkman

et al. 2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Global assessments have highlighted land-use change as a key driver of biodiversity change. However, we lack real-world global-scale estimates of how habitat transformations such as forest loss and gain are reshaping biodiversity over time. Here, we quantify the influence of 150 years of forest cover change on populations and ecological assemblages worldwide and across taxa by analyzing change in 6,667 time series. We found that forest loss simultaneously intensified ongoing increases and decreases in abundance, species richness and temporal species replacement (turnover) by up to 48%. Temporal lags in these responses extended up to 50 years and increased with species’ generation time. Our findings demonstrate that land-use change precipitates divergent population and biodiversity change, highlighting the complex biotic consequences of deforestation and afforestation.One Sentence SummaryDeclines in forest cover amplify both gains and losses in population abundance and biodiversity over time.

show abstract

Deficits of biodiversity and productivity linger a century after agricultural abandonment

Cited by 121 publications

References 38 publications

Fostering natural forest regeneration on former agricultural land through economic and policy interventions

Fostering natural forest regeneration on former agricultural land through economic and policy interventions

Roadside diversity in relation to age and surrounding source habitat: evidence for long time lags in valuable green infrastructure

Landscape-scale forest loss as a catalyst of population and biodiversity change

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About