Eutrophication and fragmentation are related to species’ rate of decline but not to species rarity: results from a functional approach

Abstract

Due to ubiquitous eutrophication and fragmentation, many plant species are actually threatened in Europe. Most ecosystems face an overall nutrient input leading to changes in species composition. Fragmentation is eVectively inXuencing species survival. We investigate if two diVerent measures of species performance of 91 calcareous grassland species-rate of decline and rarity-are related to comparable traits and hence processes. On the one hand we expected that species rate of decline is mainly determined by the processes of eutrophication and fragmentation. On the other hand we hypothesized that the importance of site characteristics may overwhelm the eVect of eutrophication and fragmentation for species rarity. Hence, we compared persistence traits responding to eutrophication, dispersal traits being related to fragmentation and ecological site factors for decreasing and increasing species and for rare and common species. The results suggest that increasing species had better means of long-distance dispersal and were more competitive than decreasing species. In contrast, there were hardly any diVerences in traits between rare and common species, but site characteristics were related to species rarity. Rare species were in the main those with ecological preferences for warm, dry, light and nutrient poor conditions. This study may represent a basis for the assessment of plant species threat. Applying the deduced knowledge about the life history of decreasing versus increasing species to habitat-scale approaches it is possible to predict which species may become threatened in the future simply from the combination of their trait values. Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (

Habitat preferences and distribution characteristics are indicative of species long-term persistence in the Estonian flora

“…The latter, especially on calcareous soils, are among the most diverse communities in Estonia. This hypothesis is supported by similar observations from other countries, where negative effect of eutrophication has been detected (McCollin et al 2000;Tamis et al 2005;Piessens and Hermy 2006;Smart et al 2006;Römermann et al 2008), and by higher persistence of nutrient-demanding species in our data (Table 4, Fig. 3).…”

Plant species extinction debt in a temperate biodiversity hotspot: Community, species and functional traits approaches

“…The relationships between species traits, landscape attributes, and species distribution have been topics of several studies (e.g. Dupré & Ehrlén 2002;Kolb & Diekmann 2005;Tremlová & Münzbergová 2007;Römermann et al 2008), and have recently been extended to include relationships with past landscape structure. These studies have served to test if different functional groups possess different sensitivity to extinction debt (Adriaens et al 2006;Lindborg 2007).…”

17 years of grassland management leads to parallel local and regional biodiversity shifts among a wide range of taxonomic groups

“…Species with a well-developed dispersal ability colonise restored habitat at a higher rate than poorly dispersing species (Ozinga et al 2005;Lambeets et al 2009;Ö ckinger et al 2010;Woodcock et al 2010aWoodcock et al , 2012. Characteristic species and food specialists are generally more vulnerable to habitat degradation (Römermann et al 2008;Ö ckinger et al 2010), but are also expected to respond more positively to renewed management than noncharacteristic and food generalist species, because habitat conditions improve most for them. Finally, a species' trophic position modulates its sensitivity to processes operating at larger spatial scales (Holt et al 1999;Vanbergen et al 2010;van Noordwijk et al 2015), making higher trophic levels more vulnerable to habitat fragmentation (Purtauf et al 2005;Krauss et al 2010;van Noordwijk et al 2015).…”