Abstract
To clarify the major factors affecting odonate assemblages in rural reservoir ponds among within-habitat environments, land use around ponds and spatial autocorrelation, we surveyed odonate adults (Zygoptera and Anisoptera) in 70 study ponds in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, during three sampling periods in 2005. Redundancy analyses (RDA) for these three factor groups were executed to determine their strength in explaining the odonate species composition. Their relative contributions were also evaluated by the method of variation partitioning. A total of 41 odonate species were recorded in the study ponds, and 24 of them, excluding rare species, were used for our analysis. Summed effects including all three factor groups explained approximately 39% of the variation in odonate species composition. We found that spatial autocorrelation was the most important, though the within-habitat environment and land use had comparable effects. We conclude that spatial autocorrelation should be considered in this type of analysis, though we could not clearly explain what caused such a spatial structure. Pond area and debris that had accumulated at the bottom of ponds were selected as the within-habitat environment, and the forests and paddy fields around ponds were selected for land use after the procedure of forward stepwise selection. These results suggest that the recent decrease of forests around the ponds has had a negative effect on the odonate assemblages.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to express our gratitude to Segovia Golf Club in Chiyoda, Chiyoda Country Club, Niihari Golf Club and the owners of the farm ponds studied herein for their kind support in conducting the dragonfly census. We would like to thank Dr. Takuya Mineta, National Institute for Rural Engineering, for the identification of plant specimens. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments that improved the manuscript. This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for project research on Developing Technology for Coexisting with Nature within Agro-forest and Aquatic Watershed Landscapes, from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan.
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Hamasaki, K., Yamanaka, T., Tanaka, K. et al. Relative importance of within-habitat environment, land use and spatial autocorrelations for determining odonate assemblages in rural reservoir ponds in Japan. Ecol Res 24, 597–605 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-008-0531-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-008-0531-z