The relationship between landscape configuration and plant species richness in forests is dependent on habitat preferences of species

Abstract

To assess the effects of landscape configuration on local plant species richness, we tested whether local species richness of forest understory plants is affected by the total forest area and forest edge length in the adjacent landscape. We also tested whether the landscape effect on species richness is different for forest and edge species. We estimated species richness from 113 forest sites in four regions in Northern Europe. At each site, we studied two plots, one at the edge and one in the core of the forest. Total forested area and forest edge length in circles with a 1-km radius, together with plot-specific variables of environmental conditions and temporal continuity of forests, were recorded at each plot. The amount of forest and the length of the forest edge in the adjacent landscape had a significant positive effect on local species richness of all understory plant species. As expected, edge species were positively affected by increasing length of the forest edge in the landscape, but surprisingly there was no effect of forest area on species richness of forest species. Temporal forest continuity had a negative effect on species richness of edge species but no effect on species richness of forest species. Our results suggest that forest edge length had a stronger landscape effect on understory plant species richness than forest area. Implications of these findings for the management of forest landscapes depend on priorities given to different species groups in biodiversity conservation, i.e. if emphasis is in total species richness or species richness of forest or edge species.

Monitoring biodiversity in the Anthropocene using remote sensing in species distribution models

“…Besides land-use composition, land-use configuration can in some cases represent a good proxy for those species requiring corridors and landscape borders to survive (e.g., Neilan et al, 2019;Vinter et al, 2016). Accordingly, the heterogeneity of land-use or of satellite reflectance data has been widely assessed in the past, using various algorithms and metrics such as multivariate statistical analysis (Feilhauer and Schmidtlein, 2009), the spectral species concept (Féret and Asner, 2014), self-organizing feature maps (Foody, 1999), multidimensional distance metrics (Rocchini et al, 2016), and Rao's Q diversity (Rocchini et al, 2017).…”

Changes in forest cover in Sudety Mountains during the last 250 years: patterns, drivers, and landscape-scale implications for nature conservation

“…In Central European forests, the recent species richness still reflects episodes that occurred in the previous century, such as forest patch shrinkage or loss of connectivity between forest patches [23,24]. Therefore, historical knowledge regarding forest distribution is necessary for understanding the recent species richness distribution, as well as for conservation management planning [11,25].…”

“…Conservation planners need to preserve resilient habitat networks, and this requires identification of habitat patches and corridors that are crucial for maintaining or establishing the connectivity of fragmented populations [25][26][27]. Changes in the landscape structure also affect the mutualistic relationships between plants and pollinating insects, which may, among others, limit the availability of pollen and consequently decrease the viability of plant populations [28].…”

Plant response to habitat amount and configuration in Swedish forests

“…For instance, edge effects may be positive instead of negative. In our study system, Vinter, Dinnétz, Danzer, and Lehtilä () observed that species richness was higher at forest edge than at forest core, both for all understorey plants and for forest specialist species.…”