Nine decades of major compositional changes in a Central European beech forest protected area
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Nine decades of major compositional changes in a Central European beech forest protected area Romana Prausova´
. Jan Dolezˇal . Marcel Rejma´nek
Received: 13 January 2020 / Accepted: 4 July 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Communicated by Kyle Palmquist.
and subsequent resurveys revealed a directional trajectory of vegetation changes. Treating time as an environmental factor and tree canopy cover as a covariable (and vice versa) in canonical correspondence analysis permutation tests where only the herbaceous layer was used, time turned out to be much more important. Variance partitioning revealed that time explained 28.1% and tree canopy 4.2% of the variation in the species data. The two variables together explained 36.8% of the variance, revealing that the shared effect of these two variables was 4.5%. Ellenberg-type indicator values point to a possible role of increasing nitrogen and decreasing pH. Several other factors potentially responsible for observed vegetation changes are discussed.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-020-01057-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Keywords Beech forest Fagus sylvatica Longterm changes Loss of diversity Vegetation resurveying Species richness
R. Prausova´ (&) Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Hradec Kra´love´, 500 02 Hradec Kra´love´, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
Abstract Lowland forests in Europe went through dramatic changes in the last century. Data accumulated from the nature reserve Buky u Vysoke´ho Chvojna in the Czech Republic provide a unique opportunity to follow beech forest development using a time series consisting of five points in time from 1926 to 2019. Our goal was to reconstruct changes in plant species richness and plant community composition over this period. Based on the available data, we concluded that vascular plant species richness per plot declined by at least 50%, possibly by 75% since 1951. Compositional dissimilarities between the first survey
J. Dolezˇal Museum and Gallery of the Orlicke´ hory Mts, Jira´skova 2, 516 01 Rychnov nad Kneˇzˇnou, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] M. Rejma´nek Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Recently, there have been substantial efforts to compare historical and current vegetation surveys in temperate forests (He´dl 2004a; Kopecky´ and Macek 2015; Bose et al. 2017; Verheyen et al. 2017; Hanberry 2019). Very often, based on two points in time, a decreasing number of vascular plant species in forest
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Plant Ecol
understories have been reported from both Europe (He´dl 2004a; Durak 2010; He´dl et al. 2010; Prach and Kopecky´ 2018; Vojı´k and Boublı´k 2018; Nagel et al. 2019) and North America (Rogers et al. 2008; Rooney and Rogers 2011; Woods et al. 2012). However, this trend is far from universal. Some st
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