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Expedient Metrics to Describe Plant Community Change Across Gradients of Anthropogenic Influence

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Abstract

Human influence associated with land use may cause considerable biodiversity losses, namely in oceanic islands such as the Azores. Our goal was to identify plant indicator species across two gradients of increasing anthropogenic influence and management (arborescent and herbaceous communities) and determine similarity between plant communities of uncategorized vegetation plots to those in reference gradients using metrics derived from R programming. We intend to test and provide an expedient way to determine the conservation value of a given uncategorized vegetation plot based on the number of native, endemic, introduced, and invasive indicator species present. Using the metric IndVal, plant taxa with a significant indicator value for each community type in the two anthropogenic gradients were determined. A new metric, ComVal, was developed to assess the similarity of an uncategorized vegetation plot toward a reference community type, based on (i) the percentage of pre-defined indicator species from reference communities present in the vegetation plots, and (ii) the percentage of indicator species, specific to a given reference community type, present in the vegetation plot. Using a data resampling approach, the communities were randomly used as training or validation sets to classify vegetation plots based on ComVal. The percentage match with reference community types ranged from 77 to 100 % and from 79 to 100 %, for herbaceous and arborescent vegetation plots, respectively. Both IndVal and ComVal are part of a suite of useful tools characterizing plant communities and plant community change along gradients of anthropogenic influence without a priori knowledge of their biology and ecology.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Mr. Roberto Resendes and Mr. João Moniz for field assistance, as well as Dr. Paul Gagnon and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments to the paper. We also thank the Forest Service of Pico, Flores and Santa Maria Islands for logistic assistance and lab space, as well as, CITA-A at Terceira Island. This work was supported by a grant from the Fundo Regional Ciência e Tecnologia, Regional Government of the Azores and PROEMPREGO, and the research project “PRO-BIO: Profiling Reliable Organisms as Bioindicators: an integrated approach for island systems” financed by the FLAD (Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CIRN, Department of Biology, University of the Azores, Rua da Mãe de Deus, 13-A, 9501-801, Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal

    José A. P. Marcelino, Patrícia V. Garcia & António O. Soares

  2. Biodiversity Group of the Azores (GBA), Platform for Enhancing Ecological Research & Sustainability (PEERS), University of the Azores, 9700-042, Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal

    José A. P. Marcelino, Patrícia V. Garcia & António O. Soares

  3. Department of Biology, Murray State University, Murray, KY, 42071, USA

    Everett Weber

  4. Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, CIBIO/InBIO, Pólo dos Açores, Departamento de Biologia, Universidade dos Açores, Apartado 1422, 9500-321, Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal

    Luís Silva

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  1. José A. P. Marcelino
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  2. Everett Weber
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  3. Luís Silva
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Correspondence to José A. P. Marcelino.

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Marcelino, J.A.P., Weber, E., Silva, L. et al. Expedient Metrics to Describe Plant Community Change Across Gradients of Anthropogenic Influence. Environmental Management 54, 1121–1130 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-014-0321-z

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