Abstract
We assess the impacts of human paths, trails, and roads on plant species richness and Shannon diversity. Most reviews of this topic have not considered community‐level measures and have focused on excessive tourism impacts. We found significant positive effects of paths on plant richness and diversity. The effect size for richness was highest when studies included roads (paved) or trails (unpaved). The effect size found for diversity was highest when studies were in grasslands. We also found experimental designs comparing high levels of path use to low levels of path use, near‐to‐path versus far‐from‐path and path‐presence versus path‐absence comparisons obtained the largest effect sizes. There was no evidence that non‐native species explained most increases in species richness or diversity. The effect sizes of human paths on plant communities are comparable in magnitude to those reported for other mammals’ disturbance and ecosystem engineering activities.
Highlights
Ecologists often conceptualize anthropogenic effects as negative, tending toward environmental destruction
Our research question was “how do paths affect plant species diversity or richness?” we looked for studies that did not include vegetation sampling in areas with paths, but, critically, included an experimental comparison that would allow us to draw a logical con‐ clusion about the effect of paths on vegetation richness or diversity
We identified relevant papers by reading the titles and abstracts of papers that were broadly about conservation, disturbance, or com‐ munity ecology, looking for papers that claimed to or appeared to study the effects of trail formation, trails, paths, or roads on plant richness or diversity
Summary
Ecologists often conceptualize anthropogenic effects as negative, tending toward environmental destruction. The nature of this impact—initially small and indirectly cascading (e.g., via trophic cascades and non‐trophic effects) versus large and direct is not clear and is difficult to establish (Estes, Tinker, Williams, & Doak, 1998; Owen‐Smith, 1987; Surovell & Waguespack, 2008) This puts into perspective the question of whether anthropogenic impacts are inherently and quantitatively different from those of other species—that is, generally large and negative, far from a “natural” equilibrium, or on the “high intensity” end of the intermediate dis‐ turbance curve—or whether, like other species, the human behavior repertoire can include low or medium intensities. To answer our research question, we determined whether anthropo‐ genic paths tend to have large positive, large negative or mixed large negative and positive effects, or whether the effects are small and cannot be distinguished from null
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