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Long-lasting Imprint of Former Glassworks on Vegetation Pattern in an Extremely Species-rich Grassland: A Battle of Species Pools on Mesic Soils

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Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that past human activities have irreversibly changed soil properties and biodiversity patterns. In the White Carpathian Mts (Central-Eastern Europe), a mosaic of hyper-species-rich and species-rich patches have developed in a regularly mown dry grassland in the area of a glassworks abandoned in the eighteenth century. We tested whether and how anthropogenically changed soils affected the distribution of extraordinary species richness. Using magnetometry we detected former furnaces, workspace, waste deposit and unaffected surrounding grasslands and compared their vegetation and environmental conditions. Archaeological features, especially furnaces and waste deposits, showed a higher pH, higher soil concentrations of exchangeable phosphorus, manganese, lead and calcium, and higher productivity. Surrounding grassland showed higher iron and sodium concentrations in the soil, higher N:P ratio in the biomass and higher species richness. Moisture was uniformly lower in soils on archaeological features, where non-trivially a more ‘mesic’ vegetation in terms of European habitat classification occurred. Plant compositional variation was best explained by water-extractable phosphorus. Because nutrient-richer patches were not moister as common elsewhere, and because species richness was only poorly accounted for by productivity, the occurrence of a species-poor ‘mesic’ vegetation on archaeological features was evidently caused by a long-lasting phosphorus oversupply which favours a comparatively small species pool of rather recently arriving species. On the contrary, surrounding phosphorus-poorer grasslands still contain the ancient species pool whose extraordinary size determines the exceptional species richness of grasslands in the study region. Its maintenance or restoration demands a persistent phosphorus deficiency.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by Masaryk University (Project No. MUNI/M/1790/2014). PH was partially supported by the long-term developmental project of the Czech Academy of Sciences (RVO 67985939). We are grateful to all colleagues and friends who helped us with this research, especially Katarína Devánová and Lucia Cachovanová, who participated in field sampling. Karel Prach, Jan Roleček, Jaroslav Záhora, Vít Syrovátka, Jan Divíšek and Kateřina Břečková commented on some of our interpretations or analyses. Three anonymous reviewers provided useful comments. Ilona Knollová exported data from the phytosociological database. Jan W. Jongepier kindly edited the paper linguistically. The Brontosaurus Movement, core unit Mařatice, has conducted conservation management of the grassland in the past decades and scythed the trodden sward in 2015.

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  1. Department of Botany and Zoology, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Kotlářská 2, 61137, Brno, Czech Republic

    Michal Hájek, Petra Hájková, Eva Hettenbergerová, Zuzana Plesková & Michal Pavonič

  2. Department of Archaeology and Museology, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Arna Nováka 1/1, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Petr Dresler & Peter Milo

  3. Laboratory of Paleoecology, Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences, Lidická 25/27, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Petra Hájková

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  1. Michal Hájek
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Correspondence to Michal Hájek.

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MH, PD and PH conceived of study and designed field sampling; PD and PM performed the archaeological research; MH, PH, EH and ZP performed field research on vegetation and soil properties; MP designed and performed chemical analyses; MH, EH and ZP analysed vegetation and soil data; PM analysed magnetometric data; PD performed spatial analyses; MH wrote the paper.

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Hájek, M., Dresler, P., Hájková, P. et al. Long-lasting Imprint of Former Glassworks on Vegetation Pattern in an Extremely Species-rich Grassland: A Battle of Species Pools on Mesic Soils. Ecosystems 20, 1233–1249 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-017-0107-2

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