Abstract
Protection of natural areas by restricting human activities aims to preserve plant and animal populations and whole communities, ensuring the conservation of biological diversity and enhancement of ecosystem services. Therefore, it is expected that the longer the protection, the stronger the desired effects. We evaluated the responses of small mammals at the population and community levels under protection in the southern Carpathian Mountains. We surveyed small mammals for five years in sites with long- and short-term protection and non-protected. Besides protection status, we included elevation, habitat heterogeneity, and the month of survey as predictors in our models. As response variables, we considered abundance, presence, species composition and species richness. Community abundance responded to all four predictors and species composition was influenced by protection status and month of study. The shrews Sorex araneus and S. minutus had positive responses to protection, both in terms of abundance and relative abundance (their ratio within the community). Our results suggest that overall, montane small mammal communities respond positively to long-term protection, especially S. araneus and S. minutus. These shrew species are considered habitat generalists, but they appear to be in fact sensitive to the habitat quality enhanced through protection.
Highlights
The primary causes of decline in global biodiversity are the destruction and degradation of natural ecosystems [1,2]
We considered elevation and the month of study because we expected a significant elevational pattern and seasonality in the small mammal community parameters
We coded the protection status of the trapping areas as an ordinal variable, based on the duration of protection as: 2—sites benefitting from long-term protection, 1—sites with short-term protection, and 0—sites in unprotected areas (Figure 1)
Summary
The primary causes of decline in global biodiversity are the destruction and degradation of natural ecosystems [1,2]. Various nature-friendly management methods have been developed and applied within organized forestry in the last 300 years [7], only a small proportion of the European woodland area remains spared of human impact, mostly in montane areas. Small mammals are an essential component of woodland ecosystems, where they are usually abundant and perform important ecological functions, including bioturbation [12,13,14,15], seed [16,17,18] and fungus [19,20,21] dispersal, and arthropod predation [22,23,24] They are one of the main food sources for birds of prey, mammalian predators and even reptiles [12,25,26,27]. We predicted an overall positive effect of duration of forest protection on small mammal abundance and richness, independent of habitat heterogeneity
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