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Grassland plant functional groups exhibit distinct time-lags in response to historical landscape change

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Abstract

Recent studies have shown significant impacts of past landscapes on present distributions of species, and discussed the existence of an extinction debt. Understanding of the processes building an extinction debt is fundamentally important for explaining present and future diversity patterns of species in fragmented landscapes. Few empirical studies, however, have examined the responses of different plant functional groups (PFGs) to historical landscape changes. We aimed to reveal PFG-based differences in species’ persistence by focusing on their vegetative, reproductive, and dispersal traits. We examined whether the present distributions of PFGs of grassland species in the edges of remnant woodlands established on former semi-natural grasslands are related to the past surrounding landscapes at different time periods and spatial scales. The effects of past landscapes varied significantly among the PFGs. Richness of short, early flowering forbs and tall, late-flowering, wind-dispersed forbs showed significant positive relationships with the surrounding habitat proportions more than 50 years ago (the 1950s) and at wide spatial scales (more than 1 km2). Richness of tall, late-flowering forbs with unassisted and other types of dispersal mechanisms showed positive relationships with the surrounding habitat proportions in recent times (the 1970s) and at smaller spatial scales (0.25 km2). Our results suggested that plant growth form, flowering season and dispersal ability—with additional information on seed bank persistence—can be good indicators for identifying species’ specific sensitivity to surrounding habitat loss. Trait-based approaches can be useful for understanding present and future distributions of grassland species with different persistence strategies in human-modified landscapes.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the members of previous laboratory of the first author, especially A. Hoshino, Y. Kitagawa, and K. Aragane, for their comments on the earlier analysis of our data, as well as for their support during the field survey. We are grateful to S. A. O. Cousins for valuable comments and suggestions on the earlier draft. We also thank T. Amano, I. Washitani, and T. Furukawa for their helpful comments and advices. A. Auffret kindly edited English and gave us informative comments to improve our manuscript. This study was carried out under a JSPS research fellowship to T. Koyanagi, with additional support from the twenty-first century COE Program, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biodiversity Division, National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences, 3-1-3, Kannondai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8604, Japan

    Tomoyo Koyanagi, Yoshinobu Kusumoto, Shori Yamamoto & Nobusuke Iwasaki

  2. Department of Ecosystem Studies, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 1-1-1 Yayoi, Bunkyo, Tokyo, 113-8657, Japan

    Satoru Okubo & Kazuhiko Takeuchi

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  1. Tomoyo Koyanagi
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  2. Yoshinobu Kusumoto
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  3. Shori Yamamoto
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  4. Satoru Okubo
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  5. Nobusuke Iwasaki
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  6. Kazuhiko Takeuchi
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Correspondence to Tomoyo Koyanagi.

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Koyanagi, T., Kusumoto, Y., Yamamoto, S. et al. Grassland plant functional groups exhibit distinct time-lags in response to historical landscape change. Plant Ecol 213, 327–338 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-011-9979-y

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