Abstract
Large herbivores influence ecosystem functioning via their effects on vegetation at different spatial scales. It is often overlooked that the spatial distribution of large herbivores results from their responses to interacting top-down and bottom-up ecological gradients that create landscape-scale variation in the structure of the entire community. We studied the complexity of these cascading interactions using high-resolution camera trapping and remote sensing data in the best-preserved European lowland forest, Białowieża Forest, Poland. We showed that the variation in spatial distribution of an entire community of large herbivores is explained by species-specific responses to both environmental bottom-up and biotic top-down factors in combination with human-induced (cascading) effects. We decomposed the spatial variation in herbivore community structure and identified functionally distinct landscape-scale herbivory regimes ('herbiscapes'), which are predicted to occur in a variety of ecosystems and could be an important mechanism creating spatial variation in herbivory maintaining vegetation heterogeneity.
Highlights
Spatial patterns in species distribution, abundance and community composition are manifestations of underlying ecological mechanisms operating at a range of spatial scales (Levin, 1992)
We aimed to answer the following questions: 1) Do large carnivores have species-specific effects on the distributions of ungulates in our multiple predator-prey system?, 2) How does human activity mediate predator-prey interactions at the landscape scale?, 3) Does this lead to ecologically distinct herbivory regimes with differential vegetation impact at the landscape scale? Using detailed data on species distributions (894 camera trap locations), landscape structure and detailed woody vegetation surveys (385 study plots) along with a novel spatially-explicit hierarchical modelling approach we decomposed the spatial variation in herbivore community structure into ecologically distinct landscape-scale herbivory regimes
Our results show how variation in spatial distribution in a community of large herbivores in a temperate forest ecosystem can be explained by species-specific associations with major ecological gradients operating at the landscape scale
Summary
Spatial patterns in species distribution, abundance and community composition are manifestations of underlying ecological mechanisms operating at a range of spatial scales (Levin, 1992). Large mammalian herbivores influence terrestrial ecosystem structure and functioning (Gordon et al, 2004; Hobbs, 1996; Schmitz, 2008) via their direct effects on vegetation structure (Charles-Dominique et al, 2016; Churski et al, 2017; Didion et al, 2009; Hempson et al, 2015; Kuijper et al, 2010a) and indirect effects on nutrient cycling (Murray et al, 2013) In this way, herbivory influences vegetation at large spatial scales, from the local landscape up to the biome level (Moncrieff et al, 2016; Woodward et al, 2004), and can lead to herbivory-mediated cascading effects on other trophic levels (Gordon et al, 2004; Palmer et al, 2015; Schmitz, 2008). This spatial variation is driven primarily by the interactive effects of abiotic
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