Global patterns of terrestrial assemblage turnover within and among land uses

Abstract

Land use has large effects on the diversity of ecological assemblages. Differences among land uses in the diversity of local assemblages (alpha diversity) have been quantified at a global scale. Effects on the turnover of species composition between locations (beta diversity) are less clear, with previous studies focusing on particular regions or groups of species. Using a global database on the composition of ecological assemblages in different land uses, we test for differences in the between-site turnover of species composition, within and among land-use types. Overall, we show a strong impact of land use on assemblage composition. While we find that compositional turnover within land uses does not differ strongly among land uses, human land uses and secondary vegetation in an early stage of recovery are poor at retaining the species that characterise primary vegetation. The dissimilarity of assemblages in human-impacted habitats compared with primary vegetation was more pronounced in the tropical than temperate realm. An exploratory analysis suggests that this geographic difference might be caused primarily by differences in climate seasonality and in the numbers of species sampled. Taken together the results suggest that, while small-scale beta diversity within land uses is not strongly impacted by land-use type, compositional turnover between land uses is substantial. Therefore, land-use change will lead to profound changes in the structure of ecological assemblages.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Local species assemblages are influenced more by past than current dissimilarities in photosynthetic activity

“…2, Supplementary material Appendix 1 Fig. This is in line with previous studies that have correlated some measurement of dissimilarity in current 'environmental heterogeneity' with compositional dissimilarity in species assemblage composition (Buckley and Jetz 2008, He et al 2009, Newbold et al 2016. This is in line with previous studies that have correlated some measurement of dissimilarity in current 'environmental heterogeneity' with compositional dissimilarity in species assemblage composition (Buckley and Jetz 2008, He et al 2009, Newbold et al 2016.…”

“…In contrast to previous PREDICTS-based studies that used discrete measures of current land use and land-use intensity (Newbold et al 2015(Newbold et al , 2016, we used a continuous measure of between-site dissimilarity in remotely-sensed photosynthetic activity that summarises (inter-and intra-annual) vegetation dynamics in a single metric (the BC EVI ). In contrast to previous PREDICTS-based studies that used discrete measures of current land use and land-use intensity (Newbold et al 2015(Newbold et al , 2016, we used a continuous measure of between-site dissimilarity in remotely-sensed photosynthetic activity that summarises (inter-and intra-annual) vegetation dynamics in a single metric (the BC EVI ).…”

Land-use effects on local biodiversity in tropical forests vary between continents

“…Although we found that assemblages in primary and secondary vegetation did not differ strongly in species richness, the differences in average range size and Simpson's evenness highlight that the similarity in species richness hides differences in abundance and species identity-sites in secondary vegetation have gained some species, particularly wide-ranged species, but lost others, particularly narrow-ranged species (Struebig et al 2013;McGill et al 2015). This illustrates a more general pattern: land-use change is not only causing a loss of species but also a shift in community composition (de Solar et al 2016;Newbold et al 2016b) towards more widespread species, resulting in biotic homogenisation (McKinney and Lockwood 1999;McKinney 2006;Ranganathan et al 2008;Karp et al 2012;Mandle and Ticktin 2013;McGill et al 2015;de Solar et al 2015). Caution is needed in interpreting our results about average range sizes, owing to collection biases in the records held by GBIF (Yesson et al 2007;Newbold 2010;Meyer et al 2015).…”

Anthropogenic disturbance equalizes diversity levels in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities

“…Mackey & Currie, ). Disturbance of natural ecosystems is frequently induced by land‐use change, while the nature of diversity changes may depend on biogeographical and ecological context (Gerstner, Dormann, Stein, Manceur, & Seppelt, ; Newbold et al., , ; Queiroz, Beilin, Folke, & Lindborg, ).…”