Demographic response of plant populations to habitat fragmentation and temporal environmental variability

Abstract

Many plant species currently exist in fragmented populations of different sizes, while they also experience unpredictable climatic fluctuation over time. However, we still understand little about how plant demography responds to such spatial and temporal environmental variability. We studied population dynamics of an understory perennial herb Trillium camschatcense in the Tokachi plain of Hokkaido, Japan, where a significant effect of forest fragmentation on seedling recruitment was previously reported. Four populations across a range of fragment sizes were studied for 6 years, and the data were analyzed using matrix population models. Per capita fecundity (the number of recruits per plant) varied greatly among populations, but the variation in population growth rates (lambda) was mainly driven by the variation in stasis and growth rates, suggesting that the general trend of reduced fecundity in fragmented populations may not be readily translated into subsequent dynamics. Temporal variation in lambda among years was more than 2 times larger than spatial variation among populations, and this result was likely attributable to the contrasting response of correlation structures among demographic rates. The among-population variation in lambda was dampened by negative covariation between matrix elements possibly due to density-dependent regulation as well as an inherent constraint that some elements are not independent, whereas positive covariation between matrix elements resulted in large temporal variation in lambda. Our results show that population dynamics responded differently to habitat fragmentation and temporal variability of the environment, emphasizing the need to discriminate these spatial and temporal variations in demographic models. Although no populations were projected to be declining in stochastic simulations, correlation between current habitat size and plant density implies historical lambda is positively related to habitat size.