TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kolk, Jens
A1  - Naaf, Tobias
A1  - Wulf, Monika
T1  - Paying the colonization credit
BT  - converging plant species richness in ancient and post-agricultural forests in NE Germany over five decades
JF  - Biodiversity and conservation
N2  - 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 postagricultural 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.
KW  - Herb layer
KW  - Land-use history
KW  - Land-use legacy
KW  - Long-term change
KW  - Resurvey
KW  - Temperate forest
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-016-1271-y
SN  - 0960-3115
SN  - 1572-9710
VL  - 26
SP  - 735
EP  - 755
PB  - Springer
CY  - Dordrecht
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - De Lombaerde, Emiel
A1  - Verheyen, Kris
A1  - Perring, Michael P.
A1  - Bernhardt-Roemermann, Markus
A1  - Van Calster, Hans
A1  - Brunet, Jorg
A1  - Chudomelova, Marketa
A1  - Decocq, Guillaume
A1  - Diekmann, Martin
A1  - Durak, Tomasz
A1  - Hedl, Radim
A1  - Heinken, Thilo
A1  - Hommel, Patrick
A1  - Jaroszewicz, Bogdan
A1  - Kopecky, Martin
A1  - Lenoir, Jonathan
A1  - Macek, Martin
A1  - Máliš, František
A1  - Mitchell, Fraser J. G.
A1  - Naaf, Tobias
A1  - Newman, Miles
A1  - Petřík, Petr
A1  - Reczyńska, Kamila
A1  - Schmidt, Wolfgang
A1  - Swierkosz, Krzysztof
A1  - Vild, Ondrej
A1  - Wulf, Monika
A1  - Baetena, Lander
T1  - Responses of competitive understorey species to spatial environmental gradients inaccurately explain temporal changes
JF  - Basic and applied ecology : Journal of the Gesellschaft für Ökologie
N2  - Understorey plant communities play a key role in the functioning of forest ecosystems. Under favourable environmental conditions, competitive understorey species may develop high abundances and influence important ecosystem processes such as tree regeneration. Thus, understanding and predicting the response of competitive understorey species as a function of changing environmental conditions is important for forest managers. In the absence of sufficient temporal data to quantify actual vegetation changes, space-for-time (SFT) substitution is often used, i.e. studies that use environmental gradients across space to infer vegetation responses to environmental change over time. Here we assess the validity of such SFT approaches and analysed 36 resurvey studies from ancient forests with low levels of recent disturbances across temperate Europe to assess how six competitive understorey plant species respond to gradients of overstorey cover, soil conditions, atmospheric N deposition and climatic conditions over space and time. The combination of historical and contemporary surveys allows (i) to test if observed contemporary patterns across space are consistent at the time of the historical survey, and, crucially, (ii) to assess whether changes in abundance over time given recorded environmental change match expectations from patterns recorded along environmental gradients in space. We found consistent spatial relationships at the two periods: local variation in soil variables and overstorey cover were the best predictors of individual species’ cover while interregional variation in coarse-scale variables, i.e. N deposition and climate, was less important. However, we found that our SFT approach could not accurately explain the large variation in abundance changes over time. We thus recommend to be cautious when using SFT substitution to infer species responses to temporal changes.
KW  - Temperate forest
KW  - Herb layer
KW  - Tree regeneration
KW  - Global change
KW  - Nitrogen deposition
KW  - Canopy
KW  - Spatiotemporal resurvey data
KW  - Cover abundance
KW  - Chronosequence
KW  - forestREplot
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.baae.2018.05.013
SN  - 1439-1791
SN  - 1618-0089
VL  - 30
SP  - 52
EP  - 64
PB  - Elsevier GMBH
CY  - München
ER  -