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Paying the colonization credit: converging plant species richness in ancient and post-agricultural forests in NE Germany over five decades

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Abstract

Massive historical land cover changes in the Central European lowlands have resulted in a forest distribution that now comprises small remnants of ancient forests and more recently established post-agricultural forests. Here, land-use history is considered a key driver of recent herb-layer community changes, where an extinction debt in ancient forest remnants and/or a colonization credit in post-agricultural forests are being paid over time. On a regional scale, these payments should in theory lead toward a convergence in species richness between ancient and post-agricultural forests over time. In this study, we tested this assumption with a resurvey of 117 semi-permanent plots in the well-studied deciduous forests of the Prignitz region (Brandenburg, NE Germany), where we knew that the plant communities of post-agricultural stands exhibit a colonization credit while the extinction debt in ancient stands has largely been paid. We compared changes in the species richness of all herb layer species, forest specialists and ancient forest indicator species between ancient and post-agricultural stands with linear mixed effect models and determined the influence of patch connectivity on the magnitude of species richness changes. Species richness increased overall, but the richness of forest specialists increased significantly more in post-agricultural stands and was positively influenced by higher patch connectivity, indicating a convergence in species richness between the ancient and post-agricultural stands. Furthermore, the richness of ancient forest indicator species only increased significantly in post-agricultural stands. For the first time, we were able to verify a gradual payment of the colonization credit in post-agricultural forest stands using a comparison of actual changes in temporal species richness.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the German Research Foundation (research grant NA 1067/1-1) and supported by the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV) and the Ministry for Science, Research and Culture of the State of Brandenburg, Germany (MWFK). We thank the regional forest authorities (Landeskompetenzzentrum Forst Eberswalde, LFE) for providing us the access to their archives from which we obtained the original site investigation record sheets. We further thank U. Jahn for her help in preparing the soil samples.

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  1. Institute of Land Use Systems, Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Eberswalder Straße 84, 15374, Müncheberg, Germany

    Jens Kolk, Tobias Naaf & Monika Wulf

  2. Faculty of Biochemistry and Biology, Potsdam University, 14469, Potsdam, Germany

    Monika Wulf

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  1. Jens Kolk
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Correspondence to Jens Kolk.

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Communicated by Daniel Sanchez Mata.

This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Forest and plantation biodiversity.

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Kolk, J., Naaf, T. & Wulf, M. Paying the colonization credit: converging plant species richness in ancient and post-agricultural forests in NE Germany over five decades. Biodivers Conserv 26, 735–755 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-016-1271-y

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