Abstract
The importance of landscape heterogeneity to biodiversity may depend on the size of the geographic range of species, which in turn can reflect species traits (such as habitat generalization) and the effects of historical and contemporary land covers. We used nationwide bird survey data from Japan, where heterogeneous landscapes predominate, to test the hypothesis that wide-ranging species are positively associated with landscape heterogeneity in terms of species richness and abundance, whereas narrow-ranging species are positively associated with landscape homogeneity in the form of either open or forest habitats. We used simultaneous autoregressive models to explore the effects of climate, evapotranspiration, and landscape heterogeneity on the richness and abundance of breeding land-bird species. The richness of wide-ranging species and the total species richness were highest in heterogeneous landscapes, where many wide-ranging species showed the highest abundance. In contrast, the richness of narrow-ranging species was not highest in heterogeneous landscapes; most of those species were abundant in either open or forest landscapes. Moreover, in open landscapes, narrow-ranging species increased their species richness with decreasing temperature. These results indicate that heterogeneous landscapes are associated with rich bird diversity but that most narrow-ranging species prefer homogeneous landscapes—particularly open habitats in colder regions, where grasslands have historically predominated. There is a need to reassess the generality of the heterogeneity-biodiversity relationship, with attention to the characteristics of species assemblages determined by environments at large spatiotemporal scales.
Highlights
Landscape heterogeneity has long been considered a key determinant of biodiversity [1,2]
Metrics of landscape heterogeneity can be regarded as good surrogates of species diversity because, in ecology, habitat diversity is associated with an increase in niche availability for species [2,6]
177 species, including waterbirds, were recorded in the 313 transects between 2004 and 2009, we focused on 113 native terrestrial species that breed within Japan to investigate the effect of terrestrial landscape heterogeneity on bird species
Summary
Landscape heterogeneity has long been considered a key determinant of biodiversity [1,2]. To effectively manage heterogeneous landscapes to maintain biodiversity, we need to understand the mechanisms of such variability in the associations between landscape heterogeneity and species richness at multiple spatial scales [2,7,8]. One reason for such context-dependent patterns may be the difference among biomes in the sensitivity of species pools to fragmented landscapes, with lower sensitivity in the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere than in Oceania and tropical regions [9,10]. Consideration of the historical and contemporary land-cover patterns that may have determined regional species pools is important for predicting whether landscape heterogeneity has a positive or negative effect on species richness patterns
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