Landscape connectivity strengthens local-regional richness relationships in successional plant communities.
Local species diversity is maintained over ecological time by a balance between dispersal and species interactions. Local-regional species richness relationships are often used to investigate the relative importance of these two processes and the scales at which they operate. For communities undergoing succession, theory predicts a temporal progression in local-regional species richness relationships: from no relationship to positive linear to saturating. However, observational tests have been mixed, and experiments have been rare. Using a replicated large-scale experiment, we evaluate the impact of two dispersal-governing processes at the regional scale, connectivity and shape of the region (i.e., patches), on the progression of local-regional species richness relationships for plant communities undergoing succession. Regional connectivity accelerates the transition from no relationship to a positive linear relationship, while the shape of the region has no consistent effect nine years post-disturbance. Our results experimentally demonstrate the importance of dispersal in structuring local-regional species richness relationships over time and suggest that conservation corridors among regions can increase local diversity through regional enrichment of plant communities undergoing reassembly.
Department of Zoology, 451 Birge Hall, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA. damschen@wise.edu
Ellen I
EI
Damschen
Lars A
LA
Brudvig
D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D003710:Demography; D017753:Ecosystem; D010944:Plants / Q000145:classification*