Abstract
The last remaining Amazonian-type swamp forest fragments in Black River Lower Morass, Jamaica, have been subjected to a myriad of anthropogenic disturbances, compounded by the establishment and spread of several invasive plant species. We established 44 permanent sample plots (covering 3.92 ha) across 10 of these swamp forest fragments and sampled all non-woody plants and all trees ≥2 cm DBH found in the plots. These data were used to (1) identify thresholds of hybridity and novelty, (2) derive several diversity and structural descriptors used to characterize the swamp forest fragments and (3) identify possible indicators of anthropogenic degradation. These were incorporated into a framework and used to determine the status of the swamp forest fragments so that appropriate management and conservation measures can be implemented. We recorded 43 woody plant species (9 endemic, 28 native and 4 non-native) and 21 non-tree species. The composition and structure of all the patches differed significantly due to the impact of the herbaceous invasive plant Alpinia allughas, the presence and diversity of other non-native plants, and differing intensities of anthropogenic disturbance (e.g., burning, cutting and harvesting of non-timber forest products). We ranked forest patches along a continuum representing deviations from a historical proxy (least disturbed) swamp forest to those with dramatically altered structural and floristic attributes (=novel swamp forests). Only one fragment overrun with A. allughas was classified as novel. If effective conservation and management does not come to the BRLM, the remaining swamp forest fragments appear doomed to further degradation and will soon disappear altogether.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adams CD (1972) Flowering plants of Jamaica. University of the West Indies, Mona
Arrhenius O (1921) Species and area. J Ecol 9:95–99
Bates D, Maechler M, Bolker B, Walker S (2014) lme4: linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1-7
Björk S, Digerfeldt J (1991) Development and degradation, redevelopment and preservation of Jamaican wetlands. Ambio 20:276–284
Breiman L (2001) Random forests. Mach Learn 45:5–32
Bryan JE, Shearman L, Asner GP, Knapp DE, Aoro G, Lokes B (2013) Extreme differences in forest degradation in Borneo: comparing practices in Sarawak, Sabah, and Brunei. PLoS One 8:e69679
Chai S, Tanner E, McLaren K (2009) High rates of forest clearance and fragmentation pre- and post-national park establishment: the case of a Jamaican montane rainforest. Biol Conserv 142:2484–2492
Cole LES, Bhagwat SA, Willis KJ (2015) Long-term disturbance dynamics and resilience of tropical peat swamp forests. J Ecol 103:16–30
Colwell RK, Coddington JA (1994) Estimating terrestrial biodiversity through extrapolation. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 345:101–118
De Cáceres M, Legendre P (2012) Associations between species and groups of sites: indices and statistical inference. Ecology 90:3566–3574
De Cáceres M, Legendre P, Valencia R, Cao M, Chang LW, Chuyong G, Condit R, Hao Z, Hsieh CF, Hubbell S (2012) The variation of tree beta diversity across a global network of forest plots. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 21:1191–1202
De Jay N, Papillon-Cavanagh S, Olsen C, Bontempi G, Haibe-Kains B (2013) mRMRe: an R package for parallelized mRMR ensemble feature selection. Bioinformatics 29:2365–2368
Dormann CF (2007) Effects of incorporating spatial autocorrelation into the analysis of species distribution data. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 16:129–138
Ewel KC (2009) Appreciating tropical coastal wetlands from a landscape perspective. Front Ecol Environ 8:20–26
Findlay CS, Bourdages J (2000) Response time of wetland biodiversity to road construction on adjacent lands. Conserv Biol 14:86–94
Garrick LD (1986) The Black River Lower Morass: a threatened wetland in Jamaica. Oryx 20:155–160
Gilliam FS (2007) The ecological significance of the herbaceous layer in temperate forest ecosystems. Bioscience 57:845–858
Godoy JR, Petts G, Salo J (1999) Riparian flooded forests of the Orinoco and Amazon basins: a comparative review. Biodivers Conserv 8:551–586
Gossner M, Fonseca CR, Pasalic E, Turke M, Lange M, Weisser WW (2014) Limitations to the use of arthropods as temperate forests indicators. Biodivers Conserv 23:945–962
Gotelli NJ, Colwell RK (2001) Quantifying biodiversity: procedures and pitfalls in the measurement and comparison of species richness. Ecol Lett 4:379–391
Hill MO, Šmilauer P (2005) TWINSPAN for windows version 2.3. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, University of South Bohemia, Huntingdon & České Budejovice
Hobbs RJ, Arico S, Aronson J, Baron JS, Bridgewater P, Cramer VA, Epstein PR, Ewel JL, Klink CA, Lugo AE (2006) Novel ecosystems: theoretical and management aspects of the new ecological world order. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 15:1–7
Hobbs RJ, Higgs E, Harris JA (2009) Novel ecosystems: implications for conservation and restoration. Trends Ecol Evol 24:599–605
Hobbs RJ, Hallett LM, Ehrlich PR, Mooney HA (2011) Intervention ecology: applying ecological science in the twenty-first century. Bioscience 61:442–450
Infante-Mata D, Moreno-Casasola P, Madero-Vega C, Castillo-Campos G, Warner BG (2011) Floristic composition and soil characteristics of tropical freshwater forested wetlands of Veracruz on the coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico. For Ecol Manag 262:1514–1531
IUCN (2014) The IUCN red list of threatened species. Version (2014).1. http://www.iucnredlist.org. Downloaded on 12 June 2014
Jackson MM, Turner MG, Pearson SM, Ives AR (2012) Seeing the forest and the trees: multilevel models reveal both species and community patterns. Ecosphere 3:79
Katovai E, Burley AL, Mayfield MM (2012) Understory plant species and functional diversity in the degraded wet tropical forests of Kolombangara Island, Solomon Islands. Biol Conserv 145:214–224
Kindt R, Coe R (2005) Tree diversity analysis. A manual and software for common statistical methods for ecological and biodiversity studies. World Agroforestry Centre, Nairobi, Kenya
Kindt R, Van Damme P, Simons AJ (2006) Tree diversity in western Kenya: using profiles to characterize richness and evenness. Biodivers Conserv 15:1253–1270
Koop H (1989) Forest dynamics. Silvi Star, A comprehensive monitoring system. Springer, Berlin
Kursa M, Rudnicki W (2010) Feature selection with the Boruta package. J Stat Softw 36:1–13
Laurance WF, Nascimento HE, Laurance SG, Andrade A, Ribeiro JE, Giraldo JP, Lovejoy TE, Condit R, Chave J, Harms KE (2006) Rapid decay of tree-community composition in Amazonian forest fragments. Proc Natl Acad Sci 103:19010–19014
Legendre P, Borcard D, Peres-Neto PR (2005) Analyzing beta diversity: partitioning the spatial variation of community composition data. Ecol Monogr 75:435–450
Liaw A, Wiener M (2002) Classification and regression by random forest. R news 2:18–22
Lichvar R (2013) The national wetland plant list: 2013 wetland ratings. Phytoneuron 49:1–241
Lindenmayer DB, Margules CR, Botkin DB (2000) Indicators of biodiversity for ecologically sustainable forest management. Conserv Biol 14:941–950
Liu H, Zhang S, Li Z, Lu X, Yang Q (2004) Impacts on wetlands of large-scale land-use changes by agricultural development: the small Sanjiang Plain, China. AMBIO J Hum Environ 33:306–310
Lugo AE (2004) The outcome of alien tree invasions in Puerto Rico. Front Ecol Environ 2:265–273
MacDougall AS, Turkington R (2005) Are invasive species the drivers or passengers of change in degraded ecosystems? Ecology 86:42–55
Mascaro J, Hughes RF, Schnitzer SA (2012) Novel forests maintain ecosystem processes after the decline of native tree species. Ecol Monogr 82:221–228
Migeot J, Imbert D (2011) Structural and floristic patterns in tropical swamp forests: a case study from the Pterocarpus officinalis (Jacq.) forest in Guadeloupe, French West Indies. Aquat Bot 94:1–8
Mitra S, Wassmann R, Vlek P (2005) An appraisal of global wetland area and its organic carbon stock. Curr Sci 88:25–35
Mitsch WJ, Wilson RF (1996) Improving the success of wetland creation and restoration with know-how, time, and self-design. Ecol Appl 6:77–83
Moran PA (1950) Notes on continuous stochastic phenomena. Biometrika 37:17–23
Nakagawa S, Schielzeth H (2013) A general and simple method for obtaining R2 from generalized linear mixed-effects models. Methods Ecol Evol 4:133–142
Newman M, McLaren KP, Wilson BS (2014) Assessing deforestation and fragmentation in a tropical moist forest over 68 years; the impact of roads and legal protection in the Cockpit Country, Jamaica. For Ecol Manag 315:138–152
Noss RF (1990) Indicators for monitoring biodiversity: a hierarchical approach. Conserv Biol 4:355–364
Oksanen J, Kindt R, Legendre P, Minchin P, Simpson S, O’Hara B, Stevens MHH, Wagner H (2013) Vegan: community ecology package. http://cran.r-project.org, https://github.com/vegandevs/vegan
Palmer MW (1990) The estimation of species richness by extrapolation. Ecology 71:1195–1198
Peng H, Long F, Ding C (2005) Feature selection based on mutual information criteria of max-dependency, max-relevance, and min-redundancy. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 27:1226–1238
Perring MP, Ellis EC (2013) The extent of novel ecosystems: long in time and broad in space. In: Hobbs HE, Hall RJ, Chichester CM (eds) Novel ecosystems; intervening in the new ecological world order. Wiley, New York, pp 66–80
Pitman NCA, Andino JEA, Aulestia M, Cerón CE, Neill DA, Palacios W, Rivas-Torres G, Silman MR, Terborgh JW (2014) Distribution and abundance of tree species in swamp forests of Amazonian Ecuador. Ecography 37:902–915
Proctor G (1986) Vegetation of the Black River Morass. In: Thompson DA, Bretting PK, Humphries M (eds) Forests of Jamaica. Jamaica Society of Scientists and Technologists, Kingston, pp 59–66
Putz FE, Redford KH (2010) The importance of defining ‘Forest’: tropical forest degradation, deforestation, long-term phase shifts, and further transitions. Biotropica 42:10–20
R Development Core Team (2014) A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna
Remm LL, Lõhmus P, Leis M, Lõhmus A (2013) Long-term impacts of forest ditching on non-aquatic biodiversity: conservation perspectives for a novel ecosystem. PLoS One 8:e63086
Roberts MR, Gilliam FS (1995) Patterns and mechanisms of plant diversity in forested ecosystems: implications for forest management. Ecol Appl 5:969–977
Roberts M, Zhu L (2002) Early response of the herbaceous layer to harvesting in a mixed coniferous-deciduous forest in New Brunswick, Canada. For Ecol Manag 155:17–31
Roskov Y, Abucay L., Orrell T., Nicolson D., Flann C., Bailly N., Kirk P., Bourgoin T., DeWalt R.E., Decock W., De Wever A., eds. (2014). Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life, 2016 Annual Checklist. Digital resource at www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2016. Species 2000: Naturalis, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Schradin C, Schmohl G, Rödel HG, Schoepf I, Treffler SM, Brenner J, Bleeker M, Schubert M, König B, Pillay N (2010) Female home range size is regulated by resource distribution and intraspecific competition: a long-term field study. Anim Behav 79:195–203
Seastedt TR, Hobbs RJ, Suding KN (2008) Management of novel ecosystems: are novel approaches required? Front Ecol Environ 6:547–553
Sitzia T, Dainese M, McCollin D (2014) Environmental factors interact with spatial processes to determine herbaceous species richness in woody field margins. Plant Ecol 215:1323–1335
Smith EP, van Belle G (1984) Nonparametric estimation of species richness. Biometrics 40:119–129
Steven D, Lowrance R (2011) Agricultural conservation practices and wetland ecosystem services in the wetland-rich Piedmont-Coastal Plain region. Ecol Appl 21:S3–S17
Teixeira AP, Assis MA, Siqueira FR, Casagrande JC (2008) Tree species composition and environmental relationships in a neotropical swamp forest in Southeastern Brazil. Wetl Ecol Manag 16:451–461
Tóthmérész B (1995) Comparison of different methods for diversity ordering. J Veg Sci 6:283–290
Turner IM, Chua KS, Ong JSY, Soong BC, Tan HTW (1996) A century of plant species loss from an isolated fragment of lowland tropical rain forest. Conserv Biol 10:1229–1244
Van Andel TR (2003) Floristic composition and diversity of three swamp forests in northwest Guyana. Plant Ecol 167:293–317
Westhoff V, Van Der Maarel E (1978) The Braun-Blanquet approach. In: Whittaker RH (ed) Classification of plant communities, 2nd edn. Junk, The Hague, pp 287–399
Whittaker RH (1960) Vegetation of the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon and California. Ecol Monogr 30:279–338
Wilson JB (1991) Methods for fitting dominance/diversity curves. J Veg Sci 2:35–46
Yule CM (2010) Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in Indo-Malayan peat swamp forests. Biodivers Conserv 19:393–409
Zedler JB, Kercher S (2004) Causes and consequences of invasive plants in wetlands: opportunities, opportunists, and outcomes. Crit Rev Plant Sci 23:431–452
Zimmerman N, Hughes RF, Cordell S, Hart P, Chang HK, Perez D, Like RK, Ostertag R (2008) Patterns of primary succession of native and introduced plants in lowland wet forests in Eastern Hawaii. Biotropica 40:277–284
Zona S (1998) Roystonea princeps. In: IUCN 2013. IUCN red list of threatened species. Version 2013.2
Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a larger project on the conservation of Cockpit Country and Black River Morass in Jamaica. Financial support was also provided through the Global Environment Facility (GEF), United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the National Environmental Planning Agency of Jamaica (NEPA), CABI and the Government of Jamaica ‘Mitigating the threats of alien invasive species in the insular Caribbean’ project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Prospere, K., McLaren, K.P. & Wilson, B. Characterizing the Status (Disturbed, Hybrid or Novel) of Swamp Forest Fragments in a Caribbean Ramsar Wetland: The Impact of Anthropogenic Degradation and Invasive Plant Species. Environmental Management 58, 655–681 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-016-0733-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-016-0733-z