Abstract
Several important habitats have become threatened in the last few centuries in the Mediterranean Basin due to major changes adopted in land‐use practices. The consequent loss of natural and seminatural orchid habitats leads to the appreciation of small anthropogenic habitats, such as cemeteries and roadside verges. Colonization of cemeteries and roadside verges by orchids has long been known, but no study to date compared the suitability of these two anthropogenic habitats for orchids. Therefore, in this paper our aim was to survey cemeteries and roadside verges and to compare these two habitats regarding their role in conserving Mediterranean terrestrial orchids. We conducted field surveys in three Mediterranean islands, Cyprus, Crete, and Lesbos, where both cemeteries and roadside verges were sampled on a geographically representative scale. We found a total of almost 7,000 orchid individuals, belonging to 77 species in the two anthropogenic habitat types. Roadside verges hosted significantly more individuals than cemeteries in Crete and Lesbos, and significantly more species across all three islands. Our results suggest that although cemeteries have a great potential conservation value in other parts of the world, intensive maintenance practices that characterized cemeteries in these three islands renders them unable to sustain valuable plant communities. On the other hand, roadside verges play a prominent role in the conservation of Mediterranean orchids in Cyprus and Greece. The pioneer status of roadside verges facilitates their fast colonization, while roads serve as ecological corridors in fragmented landscapes.
Highlights
Mediterranean landscapes are the result of complex interactions be‐ tween society and ecosystems throughout the millennia (Thompson, 2005)
We aimed to (a) study whether cemeteries or roadside verges host more orchid individuals and species, and which one of these play a more signifi‐ cant role in orchid conservation; (b) test, which environmental fac‐ tors influence the prevalence of orchids in these two synanthropic habitats; (c) examine, if there is an anthropogenic effect on the abun‐ dance of orchids, reflected by the proximity to human settlements; and (d) test whether the proximity of road has a negative effect on the occurrence of orchid individuals
Cemeter‐ ies are considered as refugia for orchids in other Mediterranean re‐ gions, due to their intensive management in the surveyed islands our results indicate that roadside verges play a more important role in orchid conservation than cemeteries in Cyprus, Crete, and Lesbos, since we found fewer orchid specimens and a less diverse orchid flora in cemeteries than on roadside verges
Summary
Mediterranean landscapes are the result of complex interactions be‐ tween society and ecosystems throughout the millennia (Thompson, 2005). Traditional land‐use prac‐ tices characterized by frequent and moderate disturbances such as wood‐cutting and coppicing, terracing, controlled burning, grazing, and browsing helped to preserve these Mediterranean habitats for a long time (Blondel, 2006). This ecological equilib‐ ria and diversity of endemic species maintained by the traditional. Small patches of remnant, seminatural vegetation with multiple threatened species became of conservation concern These can sustain threatened species in anthropogenically influ‐ enced habitats, such as midfield islets and roadside verges (Cousins, 2006; Godefroid, 1999), cemeteries (Barrett & Barrett, 2001), fresh‐ water pools and lakes (Lukács, Sramkó, & Molnár, 2013; Lukács et al, 2015), river dikes (Bátori et al, 2016), and kurgans (Deák, Tóthmérész, et al, 2016; Deák, Valkó, Török, & Tóthmérész, 2016)
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