Fragmentation affects plant community composition over time

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• 作者：C. D. Collins ; C. Banks-Leite ; L. A. Brudvig ; B. L. Foster ; W. M. Cook ; E. I. Damschen ; A. Andrade ; M. Austin ; J. L. Camargo ; D. A. Driscoll ; R. D. Holt ; W. F. Laurance ; A. O. Nicholls and J. L. Orrock
• 刊名：Ecography
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：40
• 期：i1
• 页码：119-130
• 全文大小：1315K
• ISSN：1600-0587

文摘

Habitat fragmentation can lead to major changes in community composition, but little is known about the dynamics of these changes, or how community trajectories are affected by the initial state of habitat maturity. We use four landscape-scale experiments from different biogeographic regions to understand how plant community composition responds to fragmentation over decades. Within each experiment, we consider first whether plant communities in the most-fragmented treatments diverge in composition from plant communities in the least-fragmented treatments. Second, because communities embedded in different fragments may become more similar to one another over time (biotic homogenization), we asked whether beta diversity – compositional variation across space – declines among fragments over time. Third, we assessed whether fragmentation alters the degree to which temporal change in fragmented landscapes is due to ordered species losses and gains (nestedness) versus species replacements (turnover). For each of these three questions, we contrasted patterns of compositional change in mature communities following fragmentation (disassembly; n = 2 experiments) with patterns in newly-developing plant communities in fragments cleared of vegetation (assembly; n = 2 experiments).