| 1. |
- Hudson, Lawrence N., et al.
(författare)
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The PREDICTS database : a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts
- 2014
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Ingår i: Ecology and Evolution. - : Wiley. - 2045-7758. ; 4:24, s. 4701-4735
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species' threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project - and avert - future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups - including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems - ). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015.
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| 2. |
- Andersson, Jon, et al.
(författare)
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Long-term effects of stump harvesting and landscape composition on beetle assemblages in the hemiboreal forest of Sweden.
- 2012
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Ingår i: Forest Ecology and Management. - Amsterdam : Elsevier. - 0378-1127 .- 1872-7042. ; 271, s. 75-80
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Studies on the effects of stump harvesting on forest biodiversity are scarce and studies on long-term effects are until now non-existent. We evaluated such long-term effects by sampling beetles at 14 clear-cuts with and 14 clear-cuts without stump harvesting; harvesting had been done 21–28 years before this study. By using window traps, we collected 6429 individuals belonging to 432 species in 55 taxonomic families. To control for potentially confounding effects of among-site variations in landscape setting we also assessed forest age and volume of deciduous trees within the forest surrounding each site. The long-term effects from harvesting on beetle abundance, species richness and species composition was generally small in comparison to the influence of the characteristics of the surrounding forests. The species richness of the beetle family Latridiidae and the functional group fungivores appeared, however, to be negatively affected by the previous stump harvesting, while several other groups showed strong associations to the characteristics of the surrounding forest. We found little support for considerable long-term effects of stump harvesting on beetles flying in the stands. Long-term effects of stump harvesting at the landscape scale accumulated from harvest of many localities may still be severe, and should be the subject of future studies.
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| 3. |
- Dynesius, Mats, 1958-, et al.
(författare)
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Persistence of within-species lineages : a neglected control of speciation rates
- 2014
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Ingår i: Evolution. - : Wiley. - 0014-3820 .- 1558-5646. ; 68:4, s. 923-934
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present a framework distinguishing three principal controls of speciation rate: rate of splitting, level of persistence, and length of speciation duration. We contend that discussions on diversification become clearer in the light of this framework, because speciation rate variation could be attributed to any of these controls. In particular, we claim that the role of persistence of within-species lineages in controlling speciation rates has been greatly underappreciated. More emphasis on the persistence control would change expectations of the role of several biological traits and environmental factors, because they may drive speciationrate in one direction through the persistence control and in the opposite direction through the other two controls. Traits and environments have been little studied regarding their influence on speciation rate through the persistence control, with climatic fluctuations being a relatively well-studied exception. Considering the recent advances in genomic and phylogenetic analysis, we think that the time is ripe for applying the framework in empirical research. Variation among clades and areas (and thus among traits and environments) in the importance of the three rate controls could be addressed for example by dating splitting events, detecting within-species lineages, and scanning genomes for evidence of divergent selection.
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| 4. |
- Dynesius, Mats, 1958-
(författare)
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Responses of bryophytes to wood-ash recycling are related to their phylogeny and pH ecology
- 2012
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Ingår i: Perspectives in plant ecology, evolution and systematics. - : Elsevier BV. - 1433-8319 .- 1618-0437. ; 14:1, s. 21-31
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Ash generated by the combustion of solid biofuels is increasingly being returned to the fuel’s place of origin (mostly forests). In this way, nutrient depletion and acidification caused by biofuel harvest is counteracted and a waste problem is solved. Concerns about the potential negative effects of ash spreading on forest biodiversity (in particular mosses) have been raised, but little is known. I studied the effects of the application of two types of ash (the most used self-hardened crushed ash including fine particles and a less reactive type, pellets without fine particles) on 28 moss species and 17 liverwort species. In two field experiments, one on transplants of ground-living species and one on wood-inhabiting species in situ, I measured the response during the first two months after ash application. Visible damage (discoloration from green to brown) was assessed for all species and the growth response was measured for 24 ground-living species. The responses to crushed ash were clearly related to the species’ pH ecology and phylogenetic position. The growth of bryophytes associated with acidic conditions (pooled data from 10 species) or considered as being indifferent to pH (4 species) was negatively affected, whereas there was no effect on the growth of bryophytes of non-acidic habitats (10 species). The connection to phylogeny was even clearer. Most taxa responded negatively, but transplants from the moss order Bryales (4 species) and the family Brachytheciaceae (2 species; order Hypnales) grew better when treated with ash. The genera with the clearest negative responses were Sphagnum mosses (5 species), Tetraphis mosses (1 species), Dicranum mosses (6 species), and Barbilophozia liverworts (2 species). The four red-listed wood-inhabiting liverworts studied were not significantly damaged. Concerning ash type, pellets caused smaller effects than crushed ash, both on the positive and negative side. The results show that responses to ash recycling of the bryophyte species included in this study are predictable from their phylogenetic position and/or pH ecology. Further studies are needed to determine the generality of these results and to sort out if phylogeny or current relationship to pH is the primary determinant of the response.
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| 5. |
- Johansson, Therese, et al.
(författare)
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Short-term responses of beetle assemblages to wildfire in a region with more than 100 years of fire suppression
- 2011
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Ingår i: Insect Conservation and Diversity. - : Wiley. - 1752-458X .- 1752-4598. ; 4:2, s. 142-151
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 1. Suppression of wildfires in boreal landscapes has become widespread and has seriously affected many fire favoured species. However, little is known about the response of organism assemblages to large wildfires in regions with a long history of effective fire suppression, such as Scandinavia.2. We studied the short-term effects of a >1600 ha wildfire on beetle assemblages in northern Sweden. The first summer after fire, beetles were sampled in 12 sites using 36 large window traps, half in old pine forest stands in the burned area and half in similar, but unburned control stands. The entire beetle assemblage and eight subgroups were analysed: saproxylics, non-saproxylics, moderately fire favoured, strongly fire favoured, fungivores, predators, cambium consumers and red-listed species.3. Species composition differed markedly between burned and unburned forests in all nine groups. Furthermore, beetle abundance was higher in the burned area for the entire assemblage and for saproxylics, both groups of fire favoured species, predators and cambium consumers. Species number was higher only for non-saproxylics, strongly fire favoured species and cambium consumers.4. Our results show that wildfire has rapid and strong effects on a wide range of beetles. However, we only trapped two individuals of fire-dependent beetles, which may suggest a lack of such species in the region, possibly due to >100 years of fire suppression. At the regional scale, the studied wildfire may potentially increase the abundance of these beetles after a longer period of reproduction in the burned area.
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| 6. |
- Karlsson Tiselius, Andreas, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Analyzing co-variation patterns between functional and multivariate ecological data – the functional co-inertia analysis
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Ecological phenomena are often better represented by mathematical functions than by discrete values. Examples include population trends, temperatures curves, functional responses of predators and seed size distributions. A collection of such functions describing the same phenomenon in different sites or at different points in time constitutes a functional data set. To facilitate the use of functional data sets, we develop a statistical method that allows for the analysis of co-variation between functional and multivariate data sets.We extend the multivariate co-inertia analysis framework for analyzing common variation structure between datasets to cases when one or both datasets consist of functional data. We use basis expansions of functions and weighted inner products to extend the concepts of inertia and co-inertia to functional data and present an extension of the RV-coefficient for quantifying the association between datasets. We then derive the functional co-inertia analysis (fCoIA) as a special case of the multivariate method. Using metrics derived from the functions in the basis expansion we express the fCoIA as a multivariate co-inertia analysis of basis expansion coefficients. The new approach is illustrated by coupling non-functional bryophyte species data with a functional dataset describing age-area distributions of young land-uplift islands.The technique efficiently summarizes the co-variation structure between the two datasets and provides quantifications and visualizations of the contributions from each data set to the co-variation..An important feature of the results is the graphical illustration of the common variation patterns through plots of approximations of cross-covariance function shapes describing the detailed co-variation of each variable in the multivariate data with the functional data.The methodology provides ecologists (potentially also evolutionary biologists) with a new tool for incorporating functional data into ordination analyses and considerably extends the realm of questions that can be addressed. In the future, the approach might be extended to other multivariate methods (e.g….) building on the co-inertia framework (e.g RLQ analysis) and we envision analyses matching environmental data to function valued species traits (e.g “reaction norms” of plastic phenotypic expressions).
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| 7. |
- Karlsson Tiselius, Andreas, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Bryophyte community assembly on young land uplift islands : dispersal and habitat filtering assessed using species traits
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Biogeography. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0305-0270 .- 1365-2699. ; 46:10, s. 2188-2202
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Aim: To assess habitat filtering and dispersal limitation in spore plant community assembly using bryophytes on recently emerged land uplift islands as study system. Location Gulf of Bothnia, northern Europe. Taxa Bryophytes, including the spore plant phyla Bryophyta (mosses) and Marchantiophyta (liverworts).Methods: The species compositions of 20 coastal land uplift islands differing in age, area, connectivity and habitat composition were recorded in the field. In addition, we compiled a list of the regional species pool (446 species) and gathered data on species traits related to habitat affiliations (substrate, light, moisture, and pH) and dispersal capacity (regional abundance, spore size, sporophyte frequency, sexual system, vegetative propagules). For the 420 species with available trait data, we used multivariate generalized linear models to compare trait effects on species occurrence probabilities on the islands.Results: Occurrence probabilities depended strongly on habitat affiliations. In addition, occurrence probabilities were lower for predominantly asexual species than for sexual species and for regionally rare than for regionally abundant species. Having specialized asexual propagules increased occurrence probabilities, but compensated only partly for the reductions in asexual species. No effect of the size of sexually produced spores was detected. Comparison of trait effects across island size and connectivity gradients revealed (a) reduced habitat filtering on larger islands and (b) decreasing negative effects of being predominantly asexual with increasing island connectivity.Conclusions: Both habitat filtering and dispersal capacities affect the community assembly of spore plants on land uplift islands. Asexual mosses and liverworts show landscape scale (<= 10 km) dispersal limitation. The weak or absent relationships between island connectivity and the effects of dispersal traits suggest that colonization is regulated mainly by habitat availability and the abundance of each species in a "regional spore rain" from which colonists are recruited.
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| 8. |
- Karlsson Tiselius, Andreas, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring Connectivity across Spatial Scales Using Functional Principal Component Analysis
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The interplay between organism dispersal and habitat patch connectivity is crucial for the distribution and dynamics of populations and communities. However, the appropriate spatial scales of connectivity analysis vary among species, populations and individuals, depending on their capacity and propensity to move. This scale dependence poses problems when studying assemblages including species with different appropriate scales or when the scale for a species varies or is difficult to determine. To address these problems, we develop an approach summarizing among-patch variation in structural connectivity across a continuum of scales. We do this by first treating a connectivity metric (e.g. habitat area around a patch) as a continuous function of a scale-defining variable (e.g. distance) for a number of patches. We then extract and summarize information present in the shapes of the resulting collection of "patch connectivity functions", using methods for functional data analysis (functional principal component analysis, fPCA). We apply the approach to a data set of 36 islands and show that it is possible to effectively summarize the among-patch variation in structural patch connectivity across spatial scales using only a small number of functional principal components. We also show how our functional data analysis approach to connectivity metrics can be useful (i) as an information tool for decisions regarding the design of protected area networks and (ii) in designing spatially explicit ecological studies including multiple species (e.g. metacommunity studies). We explore relationships with widely used methods in landscape ecology and show how continuous function representations can reveal information hidden in single value applications of metrics. The usefulness of the approach for analyses of functional connectivity is discussed. We conclude that the approach provides a powerful methodology to represent variation in connectivity across spatial scales that will serve many purposes within spatial ecology and biogeography
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| 9. |
- Stenbacka, Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Saproxylic and non-saproxylic beetle assemblages in boreal spruce forests of different age and forestry intensity
- 2010
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Ingår i: Ecological Applications. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 1051-0761 .- 1939-5582. ; 20:8, s. 2310-2321
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Current clear-cutting forestry practices affect many boreal organisms negatively, and those dependent on dead wood (saproxylics) are considered as particularly vulnerable. The succession of species assemblages in managed forest habitats regenerating after clear-cutting is, however, poorly known. We compared beetle assemblages in three successional stages of managed boreal spruce forests established after clear-cutting and two types of older spruce forests that had not been clear-cut. We also assessed whether saproxylic and non-saproxylic beetle assemblages show similar biodiversity patterns among these forest types. Beetles were collected in window traps in nine study areas, each encompassing a protected old-growth forest (mean forest age ~160 years, mean dead wood volume 34 m3/ha), an unprotected mature forest (~120 years old, 15 m3/ha), a middle-aged commercially thinned forest (53 years old, 3 m3/ha), a young unthinned forest (30 years old, 4 m3/ha), and a clearcut (5–7 years after harvest, 11 m3/ha). Saproxylic beetles, in particular red-listed species, were more abundant and more species rich in older forest types, whereas no significant differences among forest types in these variables were detected for non-saproxylics. The saproxylic assemblages were clearly differentiated; with increasing forest age, assemblage compositions gradually became more similar to those of protected old-growth forests, but the assemblage composition in thinned forests could not be statistically distinguished from those of the two oldest forest types. Many saproxylic beetles adapted to late-successional stages were present in thinned middle-aged forests but absent from younger unthinned forests. In contrast, non-saproxylics were generally more evenly distributed among the five forest types, and the assemblages were mainly differentiated between clearcuts and forested habitats. The saproxylic beetle assemblages of unprotected mature forests were very similar to those of protected old-growth forests. This indicates a relatively high conservation value of mature boreal forests currently subjected to clear-cutting and raises the question of whether future mature forests will have the same qualities. Our results suggest a high beetle conservation potential of developing managed forests, provided that sufficient amounts and qualities of dead wood are made available (e.g., during thinning operations). Confirming studies of beetle reproduction in dead wood introduced during thinning are, however, lacking.
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| 10. |
- Ström, Lotta, et al.
(författare)
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Different long-term and short-term responses of land snails to clear-cutting of boreal stream-side forests.
- 2009
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Ingår i: Biological Conservation. - : Elsevier BV. - 0006-3207 .- 1873-2917. ; 142, s. 1580-1587
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Effects of clear-cutting on biodiversity have mainly been studied in the short-term, although knowledge of longer term effects are often more important for managers of forest biodiversity. We assessed relatively long-term effects of clear-cutting on litter dwelling land snails, a group with slow active dispersal and considered to be intolerant to microclimate changes. In a pair wise design we compared snail abundance, species density, and species composition between 13 old seminatural stream-side stands and 13 matched young stands developed 40–60 years after clear-cutting. Using a standardized semi-quantitative method, we identified all snail specimens in a 1.5 l subsample of a pooled litter sample collected from small patches within a 20 × 5 m plot in each stream-side stand. From the young stands a mean of 135 shells and 9.5 species was extracted which was significantly higher than the 58.1 shells and 6.9 species found in old forests. Only two of the 16 species encountered showed a stronger affinity to old than to young forests. In short-term studies of boreal stream-side forests land snail abundance is reduced by clear-cutting. Our results indicate that this decline is transient for most species and within a few decades replaced by an increase. We suggest that local survival in moist stream-side refugia makes the land snails able to benefit from the higher pH and more abundant non-conifer litter in young than in old boreal forests. Our results highlight the importance of longer term studies as a basis for management guidelines for biodiversity conservation.
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