Abstract
Changes in species richness along the ecological succession gradient may be strongly determined by coexisting extinction debts of species from the original habitats and colonization credits of those from the replacing habitats. The magnitude of these processes and their causes remain largely unknown. We explored the extinction debt and colonization credit for grassland and forest specialist plants, respectively, and the local and landscape factors associated to the richness of these species groups in a 50-year process of forest encroachment into semi-natural Mediterranean grasslands. A set of sampling plots of persistent grasslands and forests and their transitional habitat (wooded grasslands) was selected within fixed-area sites distributed across the landscape. Our results confirm the extinction debt and suggest colonization credit (according to observed trends and model predictions) in wooded grasslands when compared to persistent forests, despite wooded grasslands and persistent forests having similar tree cover. Grassland connectivity and solar radiation had opposing effects on the richness of both grassland and forest specialists, and it is possible that the availability of seed sources from old forests may have accelerate the payment of colonization credit in the wooded grasslands. These results suggest that extinction debt and colonization credit have driven species turnover during the 50 years of forest encroachment, but at different rates, and that local and landscape factors have opposing effects on these two phenomena. They also highlight the importance of documenting biodiversity time lags following habitat change when they are still in progress in order to timely and adequately manage habitats of high conservation value such as the grasslands studied here.
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Acknowledgments
We thank M. Guardiola for fieldwork and plant identification support, L. Sáez for help with plant identification, G. Esparza for fieldwork assistance, J.M. Ninot for advice on plant specialists’ lists, P. Vicente for digitizing the 1956 orthophotomap and performing the training points for reclassification of the orthophotomaps, M. Pärtel for advice in conducting the analyses and M. Pärtel and two anonymous referees for valuable comments on the manuscript. This study was funded by MICINN (Spain) in the project LANDPOLNET (CGL2009-12646) and by the Spanish Consolider-Ingenio 2010 program in the project MONTES (CSD2008-00040). G. Bagaria was supported by a Pre-doctoral FPU fellowship (AP2009-4599) from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain). A. Helm was supported by the Estonian Research Council (Grant no 9223) and by the EU through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence FIBIR). The experiments comply with the current laws of the country (Spain) in which the experiments were performed.
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Communicated by Truman Young.
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Bagaria, G., Helm, A., Rodà, F. et al. Assessing coexisting plant extinction debt and colonization credit in a grassland–forest change gradient. Oecologia 179, 823–834 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-015-3377-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-015-3377-4