Contrasting multi-taxa functional diversity patterns along vegetation structure gradients of woody pastures
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Contrasting multi-taxa functional diversity patterns along vegetation structure gradients of woody pastures Simon Jakobsson1,2
•
Heather Wood2 • Johan Ekroos3 • Regina Lindborg2
Received: 24 September 2019 / Revised: 5 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 August 2020 Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Woody pastures represent keystone habitats for biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, contributing to increased resource availability, landscape heterogeneity and structural variability. High taxonomic diversity is closely linked to vegetation structure in woody pastures, but examining functional characteristics of species assemblages can shed more light on the ecological mechanisms driving divergent responses to habitat characteristics and help guide good management practices. To this end, we use a multi-taxa approach to investigate how plant, bat and bird taxonomic and functional diversity are affected by pasture tree and shrub density, structural complexity and proximate forest cover in southern Sweden. In particular, we use a trait exclusion approach to estimate the sensitivity of diversity-environment relationships to specific traits. We found little congruence between corresponding diversity metrics across taxa. Bird species richness responded stronger to environmental variables than functional diversity metrics, whereas the functional response to the environment was stronger than the taxonomic response among plants and bats. While increasing tree densities increased the taxonomic diversity of all three taxa, a simultaneous functional response was only evident for plants. Contrasting measures of vegetation structure affected different aspects of functional diversity across taxa, driven by different traits. For plants and birds, traits linked to resource use contributed particularly to the functional response, whereas body mass had stronger influence on bat functional diversity metrics. Multi-taxa functional approaches are essential to understand the effects of woody pasture structural attributes on biodiversity, and ultimately inform management guidelines to preserve the biological values in woody pastures. Keywords Bat Biodiversity Bird Grassland Management Plant
Communicated by Neil Brummitt. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-02002037-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Biodiversity and Conservation
Introduction With growing human pressure on nature, the quality of agricultural landscapes has become increasingly important for protecting biodiversity (Karp et al. 2012). Land use intensification leads to landscape simplification (Landis 2017) with homogenized biological communities as a consequence (Ga´mez-Virue´s et al. 2015). Woody pastures, consisting of a variety of grazed semi-natural grassland habitats with some tree cover (Bergmeier et al. 2010), contribute signif
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