Shelterbelts Planted on Cultivated Fields Are Not Solutions for the Recovery of Former Forest-Related Herbaceous Vegetation

Nóra Szigeti,Andrea Vityi,Leonid Rasran,Imre Berki

doi:10.3390/land10090930

Nóra Szigeti, Andrea Vityi + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/land10090930

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Abstract

Establishing shelterbelts for field protection is one of the rediscovered agroforestry practices in Europe and Hungary. Several studies have focused on the effects of these plantations on agricultural production. Prior scholarship reveals that shelterbelts enhance the diversity of bird and insect communities but generally fail to consider herbaceous cover. Our study aimed to describe the herbaceous vegetation in shelterbelts of different origins, tree species composition, and land management. We investigated surveys in four agricultural landscapes of North West Hungary, where the intensity of the landscape transformation is different. The diversity and species composition of the herbaceous vegetation were analyzed, including plant sociology and forest affinity. Our results highlight the importance of landscape history in herbaceous flora. Shelterbelts planted on cultivated without an immediate connection to former woody vegetation soil are not appropriate for the appearance of forest-related herbaceous species, regardless of tree species composition or the extent of the shelterbelt. On the contrary, the remnants of former woody vegetation are refuges for those herbaceous species that are very slow at colonizing new plantations. These findings expose that protecting existing woody areas is an essential task of agricultural land management.

Highlights

Human activities in intensive land use systems often lead to soil degradation: erosion, unbalanced nutrient conditions, acidification, and the decline of soil functional diversity [1].Living plant organisms can replace or increase the efficiency of technological solutions and at the same time favorably affect the quality of the environment, developing biologically active areas [2,3,4,5,6]
The current study aimed to describe the herbaceous vegetation in shelterbelts of ferent origins in relation to tree species composition and land management
The herbaceous layer of the examined shelterbelts showed a certain pattern according to the number of species and the naturalness value

Summary

Introduction

Human activities in intensive land use systems often lead to soil degradation: erosion, unbalanced nutrient conditions, acidification, and the decline of soil functional diversity [1].Living plant organisms can replace or increase the efficiency of technological solutions and at the same time favorably affect the quality of the environment, developing biologically active areas [2,3,4,5,6]. Human activities in intensive land use systems often lead to soil degradation: erosion, unbalanced nutrient conditions, acidification, and the decline of soil functional diversity [1]. The widespread application of shelterbelts in Central Europe after the Second World War aimed to improve agricultural landscapes and production [7,8]. Later on, their biodiversity-enhancing effect was regarded, mainly in terms of tree species diversity [9] and bird and insect communities [10,11,12,13]. Shelterbelts are ecological systems that can contain significant biodiversity. Several species within them are natural predators of pests, which can have a beneficial impact on pest control for agriculture [8,14,15]

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