Abstract
Fires are usually seen as a threat for biodiversity conservation in the Mediterranean, but natural afforestation after abandonment of traditional land uses is leading to the disappearance of open spaces that benefit many species of conservation interest. Fires create open habitats in which small mammals can live under more favourable conditions, such as lower predation, interspecific competition, and higher food availability. We analysed the role of changes in shrub cover and shrub preference by small mammals along the Mediterranean post-fire succession. We used data (period 2008–2018) from 17 plots woodlands and post-fire shrublands present in the study area (Barcelona’s Natural Parks, Catalonia, NE Spain), and vegetation structure was assessed by LiDAR technology for modelling ground-dwelling small mammal preferences. The diversity, abundance, and stability of Mediterranean small mammal communities negatively responded to vegetation structural complexity, which resulted from the combined effects of land abandonment and recovery after wildfires. We suggest that biotic factors such as vegetation profiles (providing food and shelter) and their interaction with predators and competitors could be responsible for the observed patterns. Considering the keystone role of small mammals in the sustainability of Mediterranean forest, our results could be useful for management under the current global change conditions.
Highlights
Out of all the global change drivers causing the current biodiversity crisis [1], landuse change can be considered as the most relevant in Mediterranean ecosystems, where traditional land-use practices have been positively linked to biodiversity [2]
Mediterranean small mammal communities negatively responded to vegetation structural complexity, which resulted from the combined effects of land abandonment and recovery after wildfires
Three-dimensional vegetation structure of sampling plots was assessed by ALS LiDAR [36,37] since those variables were better predictors than field-based variables for modelling ground-dwelling small mammal preferences [16]
Summary
Out of all the global change drivers causing the current biodiversity crisis [1], landuse change can be considered as the most relevant in Mediterranean ecosystems, where traditional land-use practices have been positively linked to biodiversity [2]. We hypothesised that habitats with more complexity regarding their vegetation structure (i.e., forests) would be more unsuitable for small mammals due to a combination of factors, such as a higher predation [9] and competition [18], lower food resources at the ground level [7], and more extreme temperatures than under shrub cover [19]. Mediterranean landscapes are surely much more open than current forests resulting from land abandonment (either locally or at landscape scales) due to the effects of several processes that have been suppressed, including the natural fire regime [3,17]. We provided vegetation–small mammal relationships that can be used to help decide landscape-scale land use policies including abandonment, productive agricultural uses, and even prescribed fires than may include the goal of the conservation of maximal, or not, levels of small mammal diversity (see, e.g., [20] for a similar example using forest birds)
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