Vegetation Dynamics in an Experimentally Fragmented Landscape

Abstract

In spatially heterogeneous habitats, plant community change may reflect spatially localized population—level processes that are sensitive to the size of an average habitat patch. However, local species turnover can also be determined by initial conditions and large—scale processes, in which case patch size effects may be overridden. To examine the role of patch size in directing secondary succession, we subdivided a newly abandoned agricultural field into an array of experimental patches (32, 288, and 5000 m2, grouped to sample equivalent portions of the field), and have thereafter censused the resident plant and animal communities at regular intervals. Here we report results from the first 6 yr of studies on the changing vacular plant community in an experimentally fragmented landscape. The general course of change in all patches followed a trajectory typical of old—field succession, toward increasing dominance by longer lived and larger plant species. The same group of species that dominated at the stare of the study continued to dominated after 6 yr, although in very different proportional abundances. Larger patches were more species rich than their smaller counterparts, and had a higher proportion of nonshared species, but the additional species were transient and low in abundance. Spatial heterogeneity in vegetation measured as local community dissimilarity, increased in all patches but to a lesser extent in the largest patches, where censuses of nearby permanent quadrats indicated less divergence over time. At a population level, the strongest effect of patch size was that local populations of clonal species were more prone to disappear from the smallest patches. Nevertheless, summary measures of temporal community change did not reflect significant differences in localized species turnover. We conclude that patch size does not markedly affect the rate or pattern of early secondary succession, at the scales imposed in our experiment.