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Biodiversity of man-made open habitats in an underused country: a class of multispecies abundance models for count data

Biodiversity and Conservation volume 21, pages 1365–1380 (2012)Cite this article

Abstract

Since the 1960s, Japan has become highly dependent on foreign countries for natural resources, and the amount of managed lands (e.g. coppice, grassland, and agricultural field) has declined. Due to infrequent natural and human disturbance, early-successional species are now declining in Japan. Here we surveyed bees, birds, and plants in four human-disturbed open habitats (pasture, meadow, young planted forest, and abandoned clear-cut) and two forest habitats (mature planted forest and natural old-growth). We extended a recently developed multispecies abundance model to accommodate count data, and used the resulting models to estimate species-, functional group-, and community-level state variables (abundance and species richness) at each site, and compared them among the six habitats. Estimated individual-level detection probability was quite low for bee species (mean across species = 0.003; 0.16 for birds). Thirty-two (95% credible interval: 13–64) and one (0–4) bee and bird species, respectively, were suggested to be undetected by the field survey. Although habitats in which community-level abundance and species richness was highest differed among taxa, species richness and abundance of early-successional species were similar in the four disturbed open habitats across taxa except for plants in the pasture habitat which was a good habitat only for several exotic species. Our results suggest that human disturbance, especially the revival of plantation forestry, may contribute to the restoration of early-successional species in Japan.

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Notes

  1. http://www.maff.go.jp/j/nousin/sekkei/suidozu/s_suido/index.html.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful many land owners for their allowing field survey. Iwate central forestry owners association, Tamayama regional office, the municipality forestry department, regional offices of Iwate prefecture, Sotoyama laboratory of Animal Industry Research Institute, the members of the Tohoku regional forest offices assisted with the field survey. T. Amano, T. Akasaka, Y. Hirata, T. Matsumura, Y. Mishima, T. Morisawa, K. Okabe, K. Oono, H. Sugita, S. Sugiura, T. Takahashi, Y. Tomioka, T. Yagi, M. Yui, members of Tohoku Research Center of FFPRI and forest ecosystem management group of Hokkaido University provided us useful comments. Our manuscript was greatly improved by the comments from a reviewer, Robin Russell and members of USGS. Y. Yamaura was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grand-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows no. 21–7033 and Young Scientists B no. 23780153). H. Taki was partially supported by Global Environment Research Fund (S-9) of the Ministry of the Environment, Japan. We commiserate with land owners struck by 3.11 Tohoku region Pacific coast earthquake.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Entomology, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, 1 Matsunosato, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8687, Japan

    Yuichi Yamaura, Hisatomo Taki & Shun’ichi Makino

  2. U. S. Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, MD, 20708, USA

    J. Andrew Royle

  3. Faculty of Policy Studies, Iwate Prefectural University, 152-52 Sugo, Takizawa, Iwate, 020-0193, Japan

    Naoaki Shimada

  4. Study Club on Regional Environment Planning in Tohoku, 152-137 Sugo, Takizawa, Iwate, 020-0173, Japan

    Seigo Asanuma

  5. Department of Forest Vegetation, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, 1 Matsunosato, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8687, Japan

    Tamotsu Sato

  6. Division of Environmental Resources, Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, Nishi 9, Kita 9, Kitaku, Sapporo, Hokkaido, 060-8589, Japan

    Yuichi Yamaura

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  1. Yuichi Yamaura
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Correspondence to Yuichi Yamaura.

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Yamaura, Y., Royle, J.A., Shimada, N. et al. Biodiversity of man-made open habitats in an underused country: a class of multispecies abundance models for count data. Biodivers Conserv 21, 1365–1380 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-012-0244-z

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