Abstract
Central European wet meadows are diminished by abandonment of cultivation measures, drainage, pollution, intensive agriculture and climate change during the last decades. In addition, original wet meadow communities can be threatened by immigrating neophytes. Typical invasive species in wet meadows are the steeplebushes Spiraea tomentosa and Spiraea douglasii, but their impact on the indigenous arthropod fauna is unknown. The present study therefore investigates Spiraea-induced changes in ground- and herb dwelling spiders in Spiraea sites, uncultivated meadows with interspersed Spiraea sp. and mowed meadows without Spiraea sp. using pitfall traps and sweep netting. Light intensity, vegetation height and coverage differed significantly between the Spiraea sites and the mowed meadows. In consequence, the activity density of ground-dwelling spiders was much lower in the Spiraea sites and their habitat preferences differed significantly from the two meadow types. Species preferring forests and forest edges were more abundant in invaded sites whereas specimens preferring open habitats decreased. Although the vegetation height and coverage of mowed meadows and cultivated meadows did not differ remarkably, uncultivated meadows contained less spiders of open dry habitats whereas forest species increased. In contrast, differences between herb dwelling spider assemblages of the three habitat types were not significant. Based on the results of the project, the risk of steeple bush invasion and management methods of wet meadows are discussed.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Administration of the Biosphere Reserve „Oberlausitzer Heide- und Teichlandschaft“, the National Forest Enterprise Lausitz and Mr. W. Marczycki for investigation approval and for the cooperation. We thank Waldemar Bena (Zgorzelec) for showing us several Spiraea sites in Poland and Ekkehard Mättig (Görlitz) for drawing the three habitat types in Fig. 4. We are further grateful to J.M.C. Hutchinson (Görlitz), K. Wesche (Görlitz), Björn Scholz-Starke and Jonas Hausen (Aachen) for discussions on statistical evaluation and the associate editor and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this paper.
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Balkenhol, B., Haase, H., Gebauer, P. et al. Steeplebushes conquer the countryside: influence of invasive plant species on spider communities (Araneae) in former wet meadows. Biodivers Conserv 27, 2257–2274 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-018-1536-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-018-1536-8