Land-use change is a major driver of biodiversity loss worldwide. Although biodiversity often shows a delayed response to land-use change, previous studies have typically focused on a narrow range of current landscape factors and have largely ignored the role of land-use history in shaping plant and animal communities and their functional characteristics. Here, we used a unique database of 220,000 land-use records to investigate how 20-y of land-use changes have affected functional diversity across multiple trophic groups (primary producers, mutualists, herbivores, invertebrate predators, and vertebrate predators) in 75 grassland fields with a broad range of land-use histories. The effects of land-use history on multitrophic trait diversity were as strong as other drivers known to impact biodiversity, e.g., grassland management and current landscape composition. The diversity of animal mobility and resource-acquisition traits was lower in landscapes where much of the land had been historically converted from grassland to crop. In contrast, functional biodiversity was higher in landscapes containing old permanent grasslands, most likely because they offer a stable and high-quality habitat refuge for species with low mobility and specialized feeding niches. Our study shows that grassland-to-crop conversion has long-lasting impacts on the functional biodiversity of agricultural ecosystems. Accordingly, land-use legacy effects must be considered in conservation programs aiming to protect agricultural biodiversity. In particular, the retention of permanent grassland sanctuaries within intensive landscapes may offset ecological debts.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910023117 | DOI Listing |
Parasitology
December 2024
Department of Veterinary Medicine, College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, UAE.
Ticks are important vectors and reservoirs of pathogens causing zoonotic diseases in camels and other livestock, rodents and other small mammals, birds and humans. is the most abundant tick species in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) affecting primarily camels, and to a lesser extent, other livestock. Species presence data, land use/landcover, elevation, slope and 19 bioclimatic variables were used to model current and future distribution of ticks using maximum entropy species distribution modelling (MaxEnt.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Total Environ
December 2024
Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Økernveien 94, 0579 Oslo, Norway; Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Electronic address:
Human activities present significant threats to tropical freshwater ecosystems, notably in many global biodiversity hotspots, threats that are further increased by inadequate taxonomic knowledge and the lack of appropriate biomonitoring tools. This study integrates globally validated biomonitoring approaches with DNA-based identification methods to create a macroinvertebrate-based tool for diagnosing ecosystem health and assessing the biodiversity of tropical river ecosystems in Myanmar (Indo-Burma bioregion). To evaluate river site degradation, comprehensive data on water and habitat quality, as well as land use information, were collected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcol Evol
December 2024
Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences University of Oklahoma Norman Oklahoma USA.
Most studies of local adaptation substitute the correlation between spatial distance and environmental heterogeneity for the temporal dynamics over which local adaptation evolves. The availability of detailed ecological and genomic information from lake sediments provides an opportunity to study local adaptation with unparalleled clarity from the temporal perspective. Inference can be further enhanced by including multiple lakes along ecological axes to further isolate the effects of ecological change in driving local adaptation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Bot
December 2024
Department of Plant Biology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
Premise: Understanding how population dynamics vary in space and time is critical for understanding the basic life history and conservation needs of a species, especially for narrow endemic species whose populations are often in similar environments and therefore at increased risk of extinction under climate change. Here, we investigated the spatial and temporal variation in population dynamics of Ranunculus austro-oreganus, a perennial buttercup endemic to fragmented prairie habitat in one county in southern Oregon.
Methods: We performed demographic surveys of three populations of R.
Curr Zool
December 2024
Laboratory of Island Biogeography and Conservation Biology, College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China.
Nestedness is an important part of the theoretical framework of island biogeography and community ecology. However, most previous studies focused on taxonomic dimension and overlooked functional and phylogenetic nestedness. Here, we simultaneously investigated taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic nestedness of terrestrial mammals on 39 land-bridge islands in the Zhoushan Archipelago, China.
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