Railways redistribute plant species in mountain landscapes

Abstract

1. The significant portion of global terrestrial biodiversity harboured in the mountains is under increasing threat from various anthropogenic impacts. Protecting fragile mountain ecosystems requires understanding how these human disturbances affect biodiversity. As roads and railways are extended further into mountain ecosystems, understanding the long-term impacts of this infrastructure on community composition and diversity gains urgency. 2. We used railway corridors constructed across the mountainous landscapes of the Kashmir Himalaya from 1994 to 2013 to study the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on species distributions and community dynamics. In 2014 and 2017, we collected vegetation data along 31 T-shaped transects laid perpendicular to the railway line, adopting the MIREN (Mountain Invasion Research Network) road survey methodology.3. Plant communities shifted significantly from 2014 to 2017, potentially because of an ongoing species redistribution after railway construction, driven mainly by declines in both native and non-native species richness, and an increasing abundance of a few non-native species, especially in areas away from the railway track.4. These patterns indicate an advancing succession, where initially-rare-pioneer species are replaced by increasingly dominant and often non-native competitors, and potentially suggest a trend towards delayed local extinctions after the disturbance event. Native and non-native species richness was negatively correlated with elevation, but that relationship diminished over time, with the abundance of non-natives significantly increasing at higher elevations. Synthesis and applications.Transport corridors seem to facilitate the spread of nonnative species to higher elevations, which has serious implications considering the warming mountain tops. Our results indicate that the plant communities next to railways do not reach equilibrium quickly after a disturbance. More than 10 years after railway establishment within Kashmir Himalaya, succession continued, and signs pointed towards a landscape increasingly dominated by non-native species.Our study indicates that the single disturbance event associated with constructing Kashmir Himalaya, located in the north-western side of the Himalayan biodiversity hotspot, is a mountainous valley bounded by the Pir Panjal range of Lesser Himalaya in the south and south-west, and the Zanskar range of the Greater Himalaya in the north and northeast (Dar & Khuroo, 2020). The climate of the region, marked railway in this Himalayan region had large and long-lasting effects on plant communities at and around this transport corridor and suggests the need for a longterm region-wide coordinated monitoring and management program.

Three decades of environmental change studies at alpine Finse, Norway: climate trends and responses across ecological scales

“…Although individual plant species showed changes in population dynamics in response to environmental manipulations at Finse (Figure 6), we know little about how this affects their distribution at a larger scale. For example, we lack evidence for increasing biodiversity at high elevation such as found in other mountain areas (Steinbauer et al, 2018), and data on whether invasive, lowland species manage to establish in warm or disturbed microsites at Finse such as elsewhere in the alpine (Lembrechts et al, 2018, Lembrechts et al, 2016, Rashid et al, 2021, Pauli et al, 2012. Contrasting species-specific responses to environmental manipulation suggest that there is no one general response to environmental change, which increases the relevance and need of studies at the community-level that show the collective outcome of individual species population dynamics and interactions.…”

Think globally, measure locally: The MIREN standardized protocol for monitoring plant species distributions along elevation gradients

“…Additionally, while roads represent the most prominent dispersal pathway present in mountains, they are not the only one (e.g., rivers, mountain trails, powerline cuttings, cable cars; Foxcroft et al, 2019 ). However, the protocol could be easily adapted for other pathways (as done for trails (Liedtke et al, 2020 ), railroads (Rashid et al, 2021 ), and rivers (Vorstenbosch et al, 2020 )), and we suggest that this would be of particular interest in regions with sparse roads and/or where most of the common non‐native species are wind or water dispersed.…”

“…However, the protocol could be easily adapted for other pathways (as done for trails (Liedtke et al, 2020), railroads (Rashid et al, 2021), and rivers (Vorstenbosch et al, 2020)), and we suggest that this would be of particular interest in regions with sparse roads and/or where most of the common non-native species are wind or water dispersed.…”

Invasive Plants Diversity, Ecological Status, and Distribution Pattern in Relation to Edaphic Factors in Different Habitat Types of District Mandi Bahauddin, Punjab, Pakistan

“…The effects of biological invasion on the ecosystem and human health can be very diverse. Invasive plants in ecosystems have been known to change species composition and decrease species diversity, thus harming global biodiversity [9]. Threats to the environment and human health may arise as a result of the emergence of new invasive alien plant species (IAPS) in novel environments [10].…”