Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Connectivity or area: what drives plant species richness in habitat corridors?

  • Research Article
  • Published:
Landscape Ecology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Context

The relative importance of habitat area and connectivity for species richness is often unknown. Connectivity effects may be confounded with area effects or they may be of minor importance as posited by the habitat-amount hypothesis.

Objectives

We studied effects of habitat area and connectivity of linear landscape elements for plant species richness at plot level. We hypothesized that connectivity of linear landscape elements, assessed by resistance distance, has a positive effect on species richness beyond the effect of area and, further, that the relative importance of connectivity varies among groups of species with different habitat preferences and dispersal syndromes.

Methods

We surveyed plant species richness in 50 plots (25 m2) located on open linear landscape elements (field margins, ditches) in eight study areas of 1 km2 in agricultural landscapes of Northwest Germany. We calculated the area of linear landscape elements and assessed their connectivity using resistance distance within circular buffers (500 m) around the plots. Effects of area and connectivity on species richness were modelled with generalised linear mixed models.

Results

Species richness did not increase with area. Resistance distance had significant negative effects on total richness and on the richness of typical species of grasslands and wetlands. Regarding dispersal syndromes, resistance distance had negative effects on the richness of species with short-distance, long-distance and aquatic dispersal. The significant effects of resistance distance indicated that species richness increased with connectivity of the network of linear landscape elements.

Conclusions

Connectivity is more important for plant species richness in linear landscape elements than area. In particular, the richness of plant species that are dispersal limited and confined to semi-natural habitats benefits from connective networks of linear landscape elements in agricultural landscapes.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Aavik T, Liira J (2010) Quantifying the effect of organic farming, field boundary type and landscape structure on the vegetation of field boundaries. Agric Ecosyst Environ 135:178–186

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arrhenius O (1921) Species and area. J Ecol 9:95–99

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brudvig LA (2016) Interpreting the effects of landscape connectivity on community diversity. J Veg Sci 27:4–5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chaudron C, Perronne R, Bonthoux S, Di Pietro F (2016) Influence of management practices on plant assemblages of road-field boundaries in an agricultural landscape. Appl Veg Sci 19:644–654

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cousins SAO (2006) Plant species richness in midfield islets and road verges—the effect of landscape fragmentation. Biol Conserv 127:500–509

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Damschen EI, Brudvig LA, Haddad NM, Levey DJ, Orrock JL, Tewksbury JJ (2008) The movement ecology and dynamics of plant communities in fragmented landscapes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:19078–19083

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Dembicz I, Moysiyenko II, Shaposhnikova A, Vynokurov D, Kozub L, Sudnik-Woejcikowska B (2016) Isolation and patch size drive specialist plant species density within steppe islands: a case study of kurgans in southern Ukraine. Biodivers Conserv 25:2289–2307

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doerr V, Barrett T, Doerr E et al (2011a) Connectivity, dispersal behaviour and conservation under climate change: a response to Hodgson et al. J Appl Ecol 48:143–147

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doerr V, Doerr E, Davies MJ (2011b) Dispersal behaviour of Brown Treecreepers predicts functional connectivity for several other woodland birds. Emu 111:71–83

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ellenberg H, Weber HE, Düll R, Wirth V, Werner W, Paulißen D (1992) Zeigerwerte von Pflanzen in Mitteleuropa. Scr Geobot 18. Goltze, Göttingen, Germany

  • ESRI (2010) ArcGIS desktop: release 10. Environmental Systems Research Institute, Redlands

    Google Scholar 

  • Evju M, Sverdrup-Thygeson A (2016) Spatial configuration matters: a test of the habitat amount hypothesis for plants in calcareous grasslands. Landscape Ecol 31:1891–1902

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fahrig L (2003) Effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity. Annu Rev Ecol Evol Syst 34:487–515

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fahrig L (2013) Rethinking patch size and isolation effects: the habitat amount hypothesis. J Biogeogr 40:1649–1663

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fournier DA, Skaug HJ, Ancheta J, Ianelli J, Magnusson A, Maunder M, Nielsen A, Sibert J (2012) AD Model Builder: using automatic differentiation for statistical inference of highly parameterized complex nonlinear models. Optim Methods Softw 27:233–249

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert-Norton L, Wilson R, Stevens JR, Beard KHA (2010) Meta-analytic review of corridor effectiveness. Conserv Biol 24:660–668

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Haddad NM, Gonzalez A, Brudvig LA, Burt MA, Levey DJ, Damschen EI (2017) Experimental evidence does not support the Habitat Amount Hypothesis. Ecography 40:48–55

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hargis CD, Bissonette JA, David JL (1998) The behavior of landscape metrics commonly used in the study of habitat fragmentation. Landscape Ecol 13:167–186

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Helsen K, Hermy M, Honnay O (2013) Spatial isolation slows down directional plant functional group assembly in restored semi-natural grasslands. J Appl Ecol 50:404–413

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hodgson JG, Grime JP, Hunt R, Thompson K (1995) The electronic comparative plant ecology. Chapman & Hall, London

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hodgson JA, Moilanen A, Wintle BA, Thomas CD (2011) Habitat area, quality and connectivity: striking the balance for efficient conservation. J Appl Ecol 48:148–152

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jackson ND, Fahrig L (2016) Habitat amount, not habitat configuration, best predicts population genetic structure in fragmented landscapes. Landscape Ecol 31:951–968

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jakobsson S, Fukamachi K, Cousins SAO (2016) Connectivity and management enables fast recovery of plant diversity in new linear grassland elements. J Veg Sci 27:19–28

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kalogirou S (2016) lctools: local correlation, spatial inequalities, geographically weighted regression and other tools. R package version 0.2-5. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lctools

  • Koen EL, Garroway CJ, Wilson PJ, Bowman J (2010) The effect of map boundary on estimates of landscape resistance to animal movement. PLoS ONE 5(7):e11785

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Ma M, Tarmi S, Helenius J (2002) Revisiting the species–area relationship in a semi-natural habitat: floral richness in agricultural buffer zones in Finland. Agric Ecosyst Environ 89:137–148

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacArthur RH, Wilson EO (1967) The theory of island biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Marini L, Öckinger E, Bergman KO, Jauker B, Krauss J, Kuussaari M, Pöyry J, Smith HG, Steffan-Dewenter I, Bommarco R (2013) Contrasting effects of habitat area and connectivity on evenness of pollinator communities. Ecography 37:544–551

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McRae BH (2006) Isolation by resistance. Evolution 60:1551–1561

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • McRae BH, Dickson BG, Keitt TH, Shah VB (2008) Using circuit theory to model connectivity in ecology, evolution, and conservation. Ecology 89:2712–2724

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Neel MC, McGarigal K, Cushman SA (2004) Behavior of class-level landscape metrics across gradients of class aggregation and area. Landscape Ecol 19:435–455

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Quantum GIS Development Team (2014) Quantum GIS geographic information system. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org

  • R Core Team (2016) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/

  • Rosenberg DK, Noon BR, Meslow EC (1997) Biological corridors: form, function and efficacy. Bioscience 47:677–687

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Šálek M, Kučera T, Zimmermann K, Bartuškova I, Plátek M, Grill S, Konvička M (2015) Edges within farmland: management implications of taxon specific species richness correlates. Basic Appl Ecol 16:714–725

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skaug H, Fournier D, Bolker B, Magnusson A, Nielsen A (2016) Generalized linear mixed models using ‘AD Model Builder’. R package version 0.8.3.3

  • Smart SM, Marrs RH, Le Duc MG, Thompson K, Bunce RGH, Firbank LG, Rossall MJ (2006) Spatial relationships between intensive land cover and residual plant species diversity in temperate farmed landscapes. J Appl Ecol 43:1128–1137

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Suárez-Esteban A, Fahrig L, Delibes M, Fedriani JM (2016) Can anthropogenic linear gaps increase plant abundance and diversity? Landscape Ecol 31:721–729

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taylor PD, Fahrig L, Henein K, Merriam G (1993) Connectivity is a vital element of landscape structure. Oikos 68:571–573

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tewksbury JJ, Levey DJ, Haddad NM, Sargent S, Orrock JL, Weldon A, Danielson BJ, Brinkerhoff J, Damschen EI, Townsend P (2002) Corridors affect plants, animals, and their interactions in fragmented landscapes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99:12923–12926

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Thiele J, Buchholz S, Schirmel J (2017) Using resistance distance from circuit theory to model dispersal through habitat corridors. J Plant Ecol. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpe/rtx004

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner MG, Gardner RH (2015) Landscape ecology in theory and practice—pattern and process. Springer, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • With KA (2016) Are landscapes more than the sum of their patches? Landscape Ecol 31:969–980

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We cordially thank Henrike Ruhmann and Alexander Terstegge for help with the fieldwork and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the draft manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Landscape Ecology, University of Münster, Heisenbergstr. 2, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Jan Thiele

  2. Im Dorfe 13, 24146, Kiel, Germany

    Simon Kellner

  3. Department of Ecology, Technische Universität Berlin, Rothenburgstraße 12, 12165, Berlin, Germany

    Sascha Buchholz

  4. Berlin-Brandenburg Institute of Advanced Biodiversity Research (BBIB), Altensteinstr. 34, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Sascha Buchholz

  5. Institute for Environmental Science, University of Koblenz-Landau, Fortstraße 7, 76829, Landau, Germany

    Jens Schirmel

Authors
  1. Jan Thiele
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Simon Kellner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Sascha Buchholz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Jens Schirmel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jan Thiele.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

S. Kellner employed at Division of Nature Conservation and Forestry, Department of Biodiversity, State Agency of Agriculture, Evironment and Rural Areas of Schleswig–Holstein (LLUR), Hamburger Chaussee 25, 24220 Flintbek, Germany

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 18 kb)

Supplementary material 2 (CSV 4 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Thiele, J., Kellner, S., Buchholz, S. et al. Connectivity or area: what drives plant species richness in habitat corridors?. Landscape Ecol 33, 173–181 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-017-0606-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-017-0606-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation