Abstract
AbstractAgricultural intensification has resulted in severe declines in the extent and diversity of seminatural habitats in Europe, whereas the extent of secondary habitats has increased considerably. River embankments have become one of the most extensive and widespread secondary habitats in former floodplains. We compared the diversity patterns of secondary dry and wet grasslands on river embankments with those of seminatural dry and wet grasslands in a Hungarian agricultural landscape using the following community descriptors: (a) species diversity, (b) phylogenetic diversity and (c) functional diversity. We also performed trait‐based analyses to evaluate the ecosystem services provided by these secondary grasslands. Both grassland types of the embankments showed significantly higher Shannon diversity compared with their seminatural counterparts. The cover of generalist species (i.e., cosmopolitan species, weeds and nonindigenous plant species) was high in the secondary grasslands. We found significant differences in phylogenetic diversity between the secondary and seminatural grasslands: secondary grasslands showed significantly lower mean nearest taxon distances than the seminatural grasslands. Functional diversity did not differ between the secondary and seminatural grasslands according to the Rao's quadratic entropy. However, we found higher community‐weighted means of specific leaf area, plant height and flowering period in the secondary grasslands, which are related to important ecosystem services (via biomass production and pollination). Well‐planned management actions and restoration activities could help further improve the ecological function and conservation value of secondary grasslands on river embankments, contributing to the maintenance of species diversity and sustaining the functionality of ecosystems in agricultural landscapes.
Highlights
Technological advances in the second half of the 20th century have resulted in unprecedentedly rapid agricultural intensification worldwide (Baessler & Klotz, 2006), leading to a global-scale decline of the species and habitat diversity of ecosystems (Benton, Vickery, & Wilson, 2003)
In order to obtain representative samples from the study sites, we applied a stratified random sampling approach. The embankments of both rivers were divided into 10 subsections, and both the secondary dry and wet grasslands on the upper two-thirds of embankments were sampled in each subsection using three randomly placed 2 m × 2 m plots in both habitat types (120 plots in total)
The number of diagnostic species was higher on the embankments (Table S2): secondary dry grasslands had 25 (e.g., Bromus hordeaceus, Buglossoides arvensis and Vicia hirsuta) and secondary wet grasslands had 29 species (e.g., Clematis integrifolia, P. pratensis s.l. and Veronica polita), whereas seminatural
Summary
Technological advances in the second half of the 20th century have resulted in unprecedentedly rapid agricultural intensification worldwide (Baessler & Klotz, 2006), leading to a global-scale decline of the species and habitat diversity of ecosystems (Benton, Vickery, & Wilson, 2003). A large proportion of loess grasslands in Europe have been ploughed for cereal production because of their fertile chernozem soils (Deák et al, 2018; Erdo}s et al, 2018) Today, this grassland type mainly occurs in small fragments (e.g., on ancient burial mounds, earthen fortifications, road verges or at the margins of arable fields) and its area is still shrinking (Deák et al, 2016; Molnár, Biró, Bartha, & Fekete, 2012). We hypothesized that the secondary grasslands of river embankments have the potential to act as refuges for many plant species and provide important ecological functions that play a crucial role in sustaining the functionality of ecosystems within agricultural landscapes
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