Abstract
Ecotones between plant communities have received considerable attention among ecologists in the context of fragmentation, climate change and the management of heterogeneous landscapes. However, the predictability of ecotone dynamics is low and the processes taking place within ecotones are still poorly understood. In this study we aimed to characterize the positional and structural dynamics of thirteen ecotones in an ecotone-rich steppe–wetland landscape of Hungary in relation to the inter-annual fluctuations of water regime and the gradients of elevation and of soil composition. According to our results, the ecotones between steppe and wetland communities were sharp and their positions coincided with those places in the landscape where the rate of change in elevation was the highest, confirming that microtopography is a major determinant of ecotone position. Soil boundaries were also detected, mostly downhill to the ecotones. Interestingly, the fluctuations of the water supply had no effect on the position of the ecotones but significantly influenced a structural ecotone parameter, the compositional contrast bridged by the ecotones. High water supply caused high contrast, while low supply went along with low contrast. We explain these changes by asymmetric sensitivities to edge effects. When the water supply was low, the wetland edges became similar to the steppe edges due to the decrease of wetland specialists and to the increase of steppe specialists, but steppe edges did not exhibit an opposite change in wet years, suggesting that steppe communities dominated over wetland communities. The asymmetry in the interaction between the two communities may have pushed the soil boundaries downhill to the ecotones but the currently steppe-like soil of wetland edges could also make wetland edges more sensitive to edge effects; thus, the cause-effect relationship is difficult to disentangle.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Báez, S. and S.L. Collins. 2008. Shrub invasion decreases diversity and alters community stability in Northern Chihuahuan Desert plant communities. PLoS ONE 3:e2332.
Bestelmeyer, B.T., J.P. Ward and K.M. Havstad. 2006. Soil-geomorphic heterogeneity governs patchy vegetation dynamics at an arid ecotone. Ecology 87: 963–973.
Biró, M., B. Czúcz, A. Horváth, A. Révész, B. Csatári and Zs. Molnár. 2013. Drivers of grassland loss in Hungary during the post-socialist transformation (1987–1999). Landscape Ecol. 28: 789–803.
Bodin, J., V. Badeau, E. Bruno, C. Cluzeau, J.-M. Moisselin, G.-R. Walther and J.-L. Dupouey. 2013. Shifts of forest species along an elevational gradient in Southeast France: climate change or stand maturation? J. Veg. Sci. 24: 269–283.
Borhidi, A. 1995. Social behaviour types, the naturalness and relative ecological indicator values of the higher plants in the Hungarian flora. Acta Bot. Hung. 39: 97–181.
Bot, A. and J. Benites 2005. The Importance of Soil Organic Matter. FAO Soils Bulletin 80. FAO, Rome.
Boughton, E.A., A.F. Quintana-Ascencio, E.S. Menges and R.K. Boughton. 2006. Association of ecotones with relative elevation and fire in an upland Florida landscape. J. Veg. Sci. 17: 361–368.
Bruno, J.F., J.J. Stachowicz and M.D. Bertness. 2003. Inclusion of facilitation into ecological theory. Trends Ecol. Evol. 18: 119–125.
Cadenasso, M.L., S.T.A. Pickett, K.C. Weathers, S.S. Bell, T.L. Benning, M.M. Carreiro and T.E. Dawson. 2003. An interdisciplinary and synthetic approach to ecological boundaries. BioScience 53: 717–722.
Chen, J.Q., J.F. Franklin and T.A. Spies. 1992. Vegetation responses to edge environments in old-growth Douglas-fir forests. Ecol. Appl. 2: 387–396.
Chen, X. 2002. Modelling the effects of global climatic change at the ecotone of boreal larch forest and temperate forest in northeast China. Climatic Change 55: 77–97.
Clements, F.E. 1907. Plant Physiology and Ecology. Henry Holt and Company, New York.
Copenheaver, C.A., N.E. Fuhrman, L.S. Gellerstedt and P.A. Gellerstedt. 2004. Tree encroachment in forest openings: a case study from Buffalo Mountain, Virginia. Castanea 69: 297–308.
Collinge, S.K. and T.M. Palmer. 2002. The influences of patch shape and boundary contrast on insect response to fragmentation in California grasslands. Landscape Ecol. 17: 647–656.
Courtwright, J. and S.E.g., Findlay. 2011. Effects of microtopography on hydrology, physicochemistry, and vegetation in a tidal swamp of the Hudson River. Wetlands 31: 239–249.
Danz, N.P., L.E. Frelich, P.B. Reich and G.J. Niemi. 2013. Do vegetation boundaries display smooth or abrupt spatial transitions along environmental gradients? Evidence from the prairie–forest biome boundary of historic Minnesota, USA. J. Veg. Sci. 24: 1129–1140.
Ellenberg, H., H.E. Weber, R. Düll, V. Wirth, W. Werner and D. Paulissen. 1992. Zeigerwerte von Pflanzen in Mitteleuropa. Scripta Geobot. 18: 1–258.
Erdős, L., Z. Bátori, C. Tölgyesi and L. Körmöczi. 2014. The moving split window (MSW) analysis in vegetation science – an overview. Appl. Ecol. Environ. Res. 12: 787–805.
Fagan, W.F., M.-J. Fortin and C. Soykan. 2003. Integrating edge detection and dynamic modelling in quantitative analysis of ecological boundaries. Bioscience 53: 730–738.
Fortin, M.-J., P. Drapeau and G.M. Jacquez. 1996. Statistics to assess spatial relationships between ecological boundaries. Oikos 77: 51–60.
Fortin, M.-J., R.J. Olson, S. Ferson, L. Iverson, C. Hunsaker, G. Edwards, D. Levine, K. Butera and V. Klemas. 2000. Issues related to the detection of boundaries. Landscape Ecol. 15: 453– 466.
Gastner, M.T., B. Oborny, D.K. Zimmermann and G. Pruessner. 2009. Transition from connected to fragmented vegetation across an environmental gradient: scaling laws in ecotone geometry. Am. Nat. 174: 23–39.
Gehrig-Fasel, J., A. Guisan and N.E. Zimmermann. 2007. Tree line shifts in the Swiss Alps: climate change or land abandonment. J. Veg. Sci. 18: 571–582.
Gosz, R.J. and J.R. Gosz. 1996. Species interactions on the biome transition zone in New Mexico: response of blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis) and black grama (Bouteloua eripoda) to fire and herbivory. J. Arid Environ. 34: 101–114.
Harper, K.A., S.E. Macdonald, P.J. Burton, J. Chen, K.D. Brosofske, S.C. Saunders, E.S. Euskirchen, D. Roberts, M.S. Jaiteh and P.A. Esseen. 2005. Edge influence on forest structure and composition in fragmented landscapes. Conserv. Biol. 19: 768–782.
Heiri, O., A.F. Lotter and G. Lemcke. 2001. Loss on ignition as a method for estimating organic and carbonate content in sediments: reproducibility and comparability results. J. Paleolimnol. 25: 101–110.
Hennenberg, K.J., D. Goetze, L. Kouamè, B. Orthmann and S. Porembski. 2005. Border and ecotone detection by vegetation composition along forest-savanna transects in Ivory Coast. J. Veg. Sci. 16: 301–310.
Hufkens, K., P. Scheunders and R. Ceulemans. 2009. Ecotones in vegetation ecology: methodologies and definitions revisited. Ecol. Res. 24: 977–986.
Johnston, C.A. 1993. Material fluxes across wetland ecotones in northern landscapes. Ecol. Appl. 3: 424–440.
Kertész, Á. and J. Mika. 1999. Aridification – Climate change in South-Eastern Europe. Phys. Chem. Earth 24: 913–920.
Körner, C. 1998. A reassessment of high-elevation treeline positions and their explanation. Oecologia 115: 445–459.
Ladányi, Z., V. Blanka, B. Meyer, G. Mezősi and J. Rakonczai. 2015. Multi-indicator sensitivity analysis of climate change effects on landscapes in the Kiskunság National Park, Hungary. Ecol. Ind. 58: 8–20.
Lennon, J.J., J.R.G. Turner and D. Connell. 1997. A metapopulation model of species boundaries. Oikos 78: 486–502.
Lloyd, K.M., A.A.M. McQueen, B.J. Lee, R.C.B. Wilson, S. Walker and J.B. Wilson. 2000. Evidence on ecotone concepts from switch, environmental and anthropogenic ecotones. J. Veg. Sci. 11: 903–910.
Mádl-Szőnyi, J. and J. Tóth. 2009. A hydrogeological type section for the Danube–Tisza Interfluve, Hungary. Hydrogeol. J. 17: 961–980.
Milne, B.T., T.H. Keitt, C.A. Hatfield, J. David and P.T. Hraber. 1996. Detection of critical densities associated with pinon-juniper woodland ecotones. Ecology 77: 805–821.
Muñoz-Reinoso, J.C. 2009. Boundaries and scales in shrublands of the Donana Biological Reserve, southwest Spain. Landscape Ecol. 24: 509–518.
Murcia, C. 1995. Edge effects in fragmented forests: implications for conservation. Trends Ecol. Evol. 10: 58–62.
National Research Council. 1995. Wetlands: Characteristics and Boundaries. National Academy Press, Washington.
Pärn, J., K. Remm and Ü. Mander. 2010. Correspondence of vegetation boundaries to redox barriers in a Northern European moraine plain. Basic Appl. Ecol. 11: 54–64.
Pécsi, E., O. Katona, K. Barta, G. Sipos and C. Biró 2014. Mapping freshwater carbonate deposits by using ground-penetrating radar at Lake Kolon, Hungary. J. Environ. Geogr. 7: 13–19.
Peters, D.P.C., J.R. Gosz, W.T. Pockman, E.E. Small, R.R. Parmenter, S.L. Collins and E. Muldavin. 2006. Integrating patch and boundary dynamics to understand and predict biotic transitions at multiple scales. Landscape Ecol. 21: 19–33.
Pinheiro, J., D. Bates, S. Debroy, D. Sarkar and R Development Core Team. 2015. nlme: linear and nonlinear mixed effects models. R package version 3.1–122, http://CRAN.Rproject.org/package=nlme
Risser, P.G. 1995. The status of the science examining ecotones. Bioscience 45: 318–325.
Strayer, D.L., M.E. Power, W.F. Fagan, S.T.A. Pickett and J. Belnap. 2003. A classification of ecological boundaries. Bioscience 53: 723–729.
Tölgyesi, Cs., Z. Bátori, L. Erdős, R. Gallé and L. Körmöczi. 2015. Plant diversity patterns of a Hungarian steppe-wetland mosaic in relation to grazing regime and land use history. Tuexenia 35: 399–416.
Tölgyesi, Cs., M. Zalatnai, L. Erdős, Z. Bátori, N.R. Hupp and L. Körmöczi. 2016. Unexpected ecotone dynamics of a sand dune vegetation complex following water table decline. J. Plant Ecol. 9: 40–50.
Walker, S., J.B. Wilson, J.B. Steele, G.L. Rapson, B. Smith, W.McG. King and Y. Cottam. 2003. Properties of ecotones: Evidence from five ecotones objectively determined from a coastal vegetation gradient. J. Veg. Sci. 14: 579–590.
Wierenga, P.J., J.M.H. Hendrickx, M.H. Nash, J. Ludwig and L.A. Daugherty. 1987. Variation of soil and vegetation with distance along a transect in the Chihuahuan Desert. J. Arid Environ. 13: 53–63.
Yarrow, M.M. and V.H. Marín. 2007. Toward conceptual cohesiveness: a historical analysis of the theory and utility of ecological boundaries and transition zones. Ecosystems 10: 462–476.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
42974_2016_1702188_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Hydrologic fluctuations trigger structural changes in wetland–dry grassland ecotones but have no effect on ecotone position
Rights and permissions
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
About this article
Cite this article
Tölgyesi, C., Erdős, L., Körmöczi, L. et al. Hydrologic fluctuations trigger structural changes in wetland— dry grassland ecotones but have no effect on ecotone position. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 17, 188–197 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1556/168.2016.17.2.7
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/168.2016.17.2.7