Loading…
Indicators and mechanisms of stability and resilience to climatic and landscape changes in a remnant calcareous grassland
[Display omitted] 35year calcareous grassland survey shows strong long term stability, yet high community turnover.Strong resilience to perturbations is present in a variety of mechanisms.High response diversity and exchanges at landscape level are observed.Even for highly niche specialized comm...
Saved in:
Published in: | Ecological indicators 2016-11, Vol.70, p.498-506 |
---|---|
Main Authors: | , , |
Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Subjects: | |
Citations: | Items that this one cites Items that cite this one |
Online Access: | Get full text |
Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
Summary: | [Display omitted]
35year calcareous grassland survey shows strong long term stability, yet high community turnover.Strong resilience to perturbations is present in a variety of mechanisms.High response diversity and exchanges at landscape level are observed.Even for highly niche specialized communities, conservation at landscape level is crucial.
When considering the development of conservation strategies for threatened plant communities it is crucial to understand their resilience to environmental change, taking into account current decline and the occurrence of further habitat fragmentation and climatic changes. Many recent works describe resilience character and elements, but there is little focus on the metrics and indices that describe elements of stability and specific resistance or resilience over the community composition matrix. Communities with strong niche selection might be restricted to specific resistance strategies to cope with environmental changes. This would result in a community at greater risk from increasing fragmentation and climatic changes.
In a 35 years survey of relic calcareous grasslands, we looked at measures to identify the resilience mechanisms for stability in the presence and abundance of species. We used techniques of partitioning of temporal beta diversity in nestedness and turnover components, analysis of functional strategy changes and dissimilarity analysis to detect changes in betweenplot diversity and exchanges.
Contrary to expectations, we observe strong resilience with different stabilizing mechanisms both at plot level and exchanges between plots. At the scale of our grassland complex, response diversity and environmental stochasticity allow for the maintenance of high biodiversity under natural perturbations and gradual human-induced environmental changes. This highlights the importance of dispersal, recruitment dynamics and microsite diversity.
Community resilience is more than just the sum of species resilience strategies; adaptive management strategies need more emphasis on the variability of conditions, as this can enable or disrupt important community resilience mechanisms. |
---|---|
ISSN: | 1470-160X 1872-7034 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.06.036 |