Temporal continuity and adjacent land use exert different effects on richness of grassland specialists and alien plants in semi‐natural grassland

Abstract

Aims Grassland plant species diversity is affected by local, temporal and landscape environmental factors, but what is the relative importance of those factors? Understanding this is crucial for the effective conservation of grassland vegetation. We analyzed the factors affecting species richness to contribute to native species conservation and alien species management in grassland vegetation. Location Semi‐natural grasslands in Shiroi City, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. Methods The species composition in 36 grasslands was surveyed in 2014. Plants were classified as native grassland specialist, other native or alien species. Generalized Linear Models (GLM) were developed, with the number of species in each plant type as the response variable and local (habitat area, use of mowing management), landscape (adjacent land use, connectivity to other grassland habitats) and temporal (period for which the grassland has been preserved from development, i.e., temporal continuity) factors as explanatory variables. Other GLM were developed with the presence/absence of each species as a response variable and three factors as explanatory variables. Results Habitat area, use of mowing management and temporal continuity were most important in explaining the number of grassland specialist species and had significant positive effects on their richness. Species‐based analysis identified a significant positive effect of temporal continuity on grassland specialist species. By contrast, habitat area and adjacent land use were most related to alien species richness. The number of alien species was high in grasslands adjacent to farmlands or roads. Conclusions The relative importance of temporal and spatial factors differs between native grassland specialists and alien species. Mowing is effective for the conservation of grassland specialists’ species diversity, particularly in historically old grasslands. However, it is necessary to pay attention to the invasion of alien species from adjacent residential or agricultural areas.

Effects of temporal and spatial continuity of grasslands on butterfly communities

“…Such temporal effects of vegetation history also interact with spatial scale. Both the temporal continuity and spatial area of habitats positively in uence the number of grassland plant species (Noda et al, 2022). The proportion of grassland-specialist butter y species increases with increased size of the habitat patch (Brückmann et al, 2010), although habitat size did not affect grassland-specialist plant species in that study.…”

Effects of grassland duration on butterfly communities and its relevance to grassland area

“…Current plant diversity is strongly influenced by historical habitat connectivity (50-130 years before present; Lampinen et al, 2018;Lindborg & Eriksson, 2004). Both the temporal duration and spatial area of habitats positively influence the number of grassland plant species (Noda et al, 2022). Conversely, Uchida et al (2016) did not detect the effects of the past and present grassland areas on diversity of plants, butterflies, and orthopterans.…”

Assessing spatially explicit long-term landscape dynamics based on automated production of land category layers from Danish late 19th century topographic maps

“…Long term, spatially explicit land use and land cover (LULC) information is critical to several applications, such as analyses of landscape dynamics and effect of changing drivers (Abadie et (Hanski, 1999) as shown for e.g., forest (Bradshaw et al, 2015;Joks et al, 2023;Kaim et al, 2016), grassland (Horstmann et al, 2023;Noda et al, 2022, Scherreiks et al, 2022 and scrubland (Gamboa-Badilla et al, 2020) habitats. Furthermore, LULC history highly affects greenhouse gas emissions and storage (Fuchs et al, 2016;Nitch et al, 2018) and ecosystem service provision in general (Watson et al, 2021).…”