Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Extinction debt in naturally contracting mountain meadows in the Pacific Northwest, USA: varying responses of plants and feeding guilds of nocturnal moths

  • Original paper
  • Published:
Biodiversity and Conservation Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Fire suppression and climate change are leading to habitat fragmentation in temperate montane meadows across the globe, raising concerns about biodiversity loss. Restoration strategies may depend on the rate and nature of species response to habitat loss. We examined the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on plants and nocturnal moths in natural montane meadows in the western Cascades, Oregon, USA, using generalized additive mixed models, non-metric multidimensional scaling, and multiple response permutation procedure. Historic (1949) rather than current (2005) meadow size explained species richness of herbaceous plants and herb-feeding moths and meadow plant community structure, indicating that loss of meadow species may be delayed by many decades following loss of meadow habitat, resulting in an extinction debt. In contrast, abundance of herb-feeding moths and species richness and abundance of woody plant-feeding moths were related to recent meadow configuration: as meadows are invaded by woody plants, abundance of meadow species declines, and woody plants and associated moths increase. Despite decades of fire suppression and climate change, montane meadows in many temperate mountain landscapes may still be amenable to restoration.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Adriaens D, Honnay O, Hermy M (2006) No evidence of a plant extinction debt in highly fragmented calcareous grasslands in Belgium. Biol Conserv 133:212–224

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bommarco R, Lindborg R, Marini L, Öckinger E (2014) Extinction debt for plants and flower-visiting insects in landscapes with contrasting land use history. Divers Distrib 20(5):591–599

  • Brooks TM, Pimm SL, Oyugi JO (1999) Time lag between deforestation and bird extinction in tropical forest fragments. Conserv Biol 13:1140–1150

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cousins SA, Vanhoenacker D (2011) Detection of extinction debt depends on scale and specialization. Biol Conserv 144:782–787

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cristofoli S, Monty A, Mahy G (2010) Historical landscape structure affects plant species richness in wet heathlands with complex landscape dynamics. Landsc Urban Plann 98:92–98

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dennis RLH, Dapporto L, Dover JW, Shreeve TG (2013) Corridors and barriers in biodiversity conservation; a novel resource-based habitat perspective for butterflies. Biodivers Conserv 22:2709–2734

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Diamond JM (1972) Biogeographic kinetics: estimation of relaxation times for avifaunas of southwestern pacific islands. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 69:3199–3203

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fahrig L (2003) Effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity. Annu Rev Ecol Evol Syst 34:487–515

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Franklin JF, Dyrness CT (1988) Natural vegetation of Oregon and Washington. Oregon State University Press, Corvallis

    Google Scholar 

  • Halpern CB, Antos JA, Rice JM, Haugo RD, Lang NL (2010) Tree invasion of a montane meadow complex: temporal trends, spatial patterns, and biotic interactions. J Veg Sci 21(4):717–732

  • Halpern CB, Haugo RD, Antos JA, Kaas SS, Kilanowski AL (2012) Grassland restoration with and without fire: evidence from a tree-removal experiment. Ecol Appl 22:425–441

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hambäck PA, Summerville KS, Steffan-Dewenter I, Krauss J, Englund G, Crist TO (2007) Habitat specialization, body size, and family identity explain lepidopteran density-area relationships in a cross-continental comparison. P Natl Acad Sci USA 104(20):8368–8373

  • Hanski I, Ovaskainen O (2002) Extinction debt at extinction threshold. Conserv Biol 16:666–673

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haugo RD, Halpern CB (2007) Vegetation responses to conifer encroachment in a dry montane meadow: a chronosequence approach. Can J Bot 85:285–298

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Helm A, Hanski I, Pärtel M (2006) Slow response of plant species richness to habitat loss and fragmentation. Ecol Lett 9:72–77

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Highland SA (2011) The historic and contemporary ecology of western cascade meadows: archeology, vegetation, and macromoth ecology. Dissertation, Oregon State University

  • Highland SA, Miller JC, Jones JA (2013) Determinants of moth diversity and community in a temperate mountain landscape: vegetation, topography, and seasonality. Ecosphere 4(10):129. doi:10.1890/ES12-00384.1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hitchcock CL, Cronquist A (1973) Flora of the Pacific Northwest: an illustrated manual. University of Washington Press, Seattle

    Google Scholar 

  • Krauss J et al (2010) Habitat fragmentation causes immediate and time-delayed biodiversity loss at different trophic levels. Ecol Lett 13:597–605

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kruskal JB (1964) Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis. Psychometrika 29:1–26

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kuussaari M et al (2009) Extinction debt: a challenge for biodiversity conservation. Trends Ecol Evol 24:564–571

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lindborg R (2007) Evaluating the distribution of plant life-history traits in relation to current and historical landscape configurations. J Ecol 95:555–564

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lindborg R, Eriksson O (2004) Historical landscape connectivity affects present plant species diversity. Ecology 85:1840–1845

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCune B (1994) Improving community analysis with the Beals smoothing function. Ecoscience 1:82–86

    Google Scholar 

  • McCune B, Grace JB (2002) Analysis of ecological communities. MJM Software Design, Gleneden Beach, Oregon

    Google Scholar 

  • McCune B, Mefford MJ (2006) PC-ORD. Multivariate analysis of ecological data. Version 5.31. MjM Software, Gleneden Beach, Oregon

  • Mielke PW Jr (1984) Meteorological applications of permutation techniques based on distance functions. In: Krishnaiah PR, Sen PK (eds) Handbook of statistics, vol 4. Elsevier Science Publications, Amsterdam, pp 813–830

    Google Scholar 

  • Mielke PW Jr, Berry KJ (2001) Permutation methods: a distance function approach. Springer, Berlin

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Miller JC (1995) Caterpillars of Pacific Northwest forests and woodlands. National Center of Forest Health Management, USDA Forest Service, Morgantown, West Virginia

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller EA, Halpern CB (1998) Effects of environment and grazing disturbance on tree establishment in meadows of the central Cascade Range, Oregon, USA. J Veg Sci 9:265–282

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Miller JC, Hammond PC (2000) Macromoths of Northwest forests and woodlands. Forest Health Technology Enterprise Team, USDA Forest Service, Morgantown, West Virginia

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller JC, Hammond PC (2003) Butterflies and moths of Pacific Northwest forests and woodlands: rare, endangered, and management-sensitive species. Forest Health Technology Enterprise Team, USDA Forest Service, Morgantown, West Virginia

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller JC, Hammond PC (2007) Lepidoptera of the Pacific Northwest: caterpillars and adults. Forest Health Technology Enterprise Team, USDA Forest Service, Morgantown, West Virginia

    Google Scholar 

  • Nieminen M (1996) Migration of moth species in a network of small islands. Oecologia 108(4):643–651

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Norman SP, Taylor AH (2005) Pine forest expansion along a forest-meadow ecotone in northeastern California, USA. Forest Ecol Manag 215:51–68

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Öckinger E et al (2010) Life-history traits predict species responses to habitat area and isolation: a cross-continental synthesis. Ecol Lett 13:969–979

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Polus E, Vandewoestigne S, Choutt J, Baguette M (2007) Tracking the effects of one century of habitat loss and fragmentation on calcareous grassland butterfly communities. Biodivers Conserv 16:3423–3436

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • R Development Core Team (2013) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. http://www.R-project.org. Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna

  • Sang A, Teder T, Helm A, Pärtel M (2010) Indirect evidence for an extinction debt of grassland butterflies half century after habitat loss. Biol Conserv 143:1405–1413

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sitzia T, Trentanovi G (2011) Maggengo meadow patches enclosed by forests in the Italian Alps: evidence of landscape legacy on plant diversity. Biodivers Conserv 20:945–961

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stohlgren TJ, Falkner MB, Schell JD (1995) A modified-Whittaker nested vegetation sampling method. Plant Ecol 117:113–121

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Takaoka S, Swanson FJ (2008) Change in extent of meadows and shrub fields in the central western cascades, Oregon. Prof Geogr 60:527–540

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tilman D, Lehman CL, Yin C (1994) Habitat destruction, dispersal, and deterministic extinction in competitive communities. Am Nat 149:407–435

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tilman D et al (2001) Forecasting agriculturally driven global environmental change. Science 292:281–284

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • USDA, NRCS (2013) The PLANTS database. http://plants.usda.gov. Accessed 17 April 2013

  • Vellend M et al (2006) Extinction debt of forest plants persists for more than a century following habitat fragmentation. Ecology 87:542–548

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wood SN (2006) Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. Chapman & Hall, Boca Raton

    Google Scholar 

  • Wood SN (2011) Fast stable restricted maximum likelihood and marginal likelihood estimation of semiparametric generalized linear models. J R Stat Soc B 73:3–36

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zier JL, Baker WL (2006) A century of vegetation change in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado: an analysis using repeat photography. For Ecol Manag 228:251–262

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants to the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest and LTER (NSF 0823380) and the NSF EcoInformatics Summer Institute REU (NSF 1005175). We thank J. Miller for use of the moth traps and insightful discussions about moths. We thank M. Santelmann for vegetation related discussions. We thank EISI students from 2008 for field assistance, and D. Ross and P. Hammond for help with moth identifications.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, 104 CEOAS Administration Building, Corvallis, OR, 97330, USA

    Steven A. Highland & Julia A. Jones

Authors
  1. Steven A. Highland
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Julia A. Jones
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Steven A. Highland.

Additional information

Communicated by Peter J. T. White.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 5 and 6.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Scatterplot showing the distribution of samples by calendar day (x-axis) versus 1949 meadow area (y-axis). Note that samples were taken in large and small meadows throughout the sampling season

Full size image
Fig. 6
figure 6

GAMM plot showing the trend in richness (a) and abundance (b) of nocturnal moths in the Andrews Forest using a 5-year dataset. Sample period number refers to the month in which the sample was taken (ex: sample period 7 = July). Figures taken from Highland et al. (2013)

Full size image

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Highland, S.A., Jones, J.A. Extinction debt in naturally contracting mountain meadows in the Pacific Northwest, USA: varying responses of plants and feeding guilds of nocturnal moths. Biodivers Conserv 23, 2529–2544 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-014-0737-z

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-014-0737-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation