Abstract
Extensively harvested grassland ecosystems contribute substantially to European biodiversity, but different kinds of grassland usage may selectively foster individual taxa. A combination of management options may offer a promising way to maximize biodiversity at the landscape scale. Here, we test this hypothesis based on 91 butterfly samples taken in the years 2013–2015 in differently managed areas within a large conservation area, the National Park Neusiedler See/Seewinkel in eastern-most Austria. Altogether, we recorded 4713 butterfly individuals of 35 species. Based on these records, we show that the parallelism of three management options, i.e. pasturing by mobile cattle herds, annual hay cut in early summer, and fallow land mulched in late summer, increase species diversity of butterflies and burnet moths in the regional meta-community. Even though spatial distances between our sample sites were small compared to the activity ranges of adult butterflies, we found that species composition of butterfly and burnet assemblages significantly differed between the three management options, indicating that assemblages were shaped by factors at the site level. Differences in species composition were stable across three consecutive years, even though there was annual variation in butterfly assemblages. Other tested co-variables (soil moisture, soil nitrogen, abundance of nectar flowers and local plant species richness) did not additionally contribute to explaining species composition of butterfly communities. We conclude that maintaining a combination of three complementary management options is indeed a relevant strategy for biodiversity preservation in this internationally renowned conservation area.
Highlights
The ‘semi-natural’ grasslands of temperate Europe are the result of a long history of human land use (Ellenberg 2009)
Having established the existence of assemblage differences between butterflies associated with the three land-use dbRDA2 (28.7% of fitted, 11.1% of total variation) types, we explored whether certain butterfly species may serve as indicators of the respective land-use types using the ‘indval’ procedure of Dufrene and Legendre (1997) as implemented in Roberts (2016)
The Ellenberg index values for humidity significantly varied among the local plant assemblages of the three management types whereas soil nitrogen did not capture a significant additional fraction of variance. These site descriptors explained about 38.6% of the variance in plant species composition in a distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA) model
Summary
The ‘semi-natural’ grasslands of temperate Europe are the result of a long history of human land use (Ellenberg 2009). Traditional low-intensity grazing and hay making have generated ecosystems that often are species-rich These systems are of high value for biodiversity conservation (Plieninger et al 2006). Fostering their maintenance is a goal of European agri-environmental policies (Dover et al 2011) and a frequent focus of management plans in national parks and other kinds of nature reserves (Öckinger et al 2006). While the importance of semi-natural grasslands for biological conservation in Europe is undebated, the ‘optimal’ management to optimize positive effects on biodiversity is less evident. Plant diversity may be maximized under higher grazing intensities than insect diversity
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