Diversity–disturbance relationship in forest landscapes

Abstract

Despite decades of research, there is an intense debate about the consistency of the hump-shaped pattern describing the relationship between diversity and disturbance as predicted by the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH). Previous meta-analyses have not explicitly considered interactive effects of disturbance frequency and intensity of disturbance on plant species diversity in terrestrial landscapes. We conducted meta-analyses to test the applicability of IDH by simultaneously examining the relationship between species richness, disturbance frequency (quantified as time since last disturbance as originally proposed) and intensity of disturbance in forest landscapes. The effects of disturbance frequency, intensity, and their interaction on species richness was evaluated using a mixed-effects model. We found that species richness peaks at intermediate frequency after both high and intermediate disturbance intensities, but the richness-frequency relationship differed between intensity classes. Our study highlights the need to measure multiple disturbance components that could help reconcile conflicting empirical results on the effect of disturbance on plant species diversity.