title: Global environmental change effects on ecosystems: the importance of land-use legacies.
abstract: One of the major challenges in ecology is to predict how multiple global environmental changes will affect future ecosystem patterns (e.g. plant community composition) and processes (e.g. nutrient cycling). Here, we highlight arguments for the necessary inclusion of land-use legacies in this endeavour. Alterations in resources and conditions engendered by previous land use, together with influences on plant community processes such as dispersal, selection, drift and speciation, have steered communities and ecosystem functions onto trajectories of change. These trajectories may be modulated by contemporary environmental changes such as climate warming and nitrogen deposition. We performed a literature review which suggests that these potential interactions have rarely been investigated. This crucial oversight is potentially due to an assumption that knowledge of the contemporary state allows accurate projection into the future. Lessons from other complex dynamic systems, and the recent recognition of the importance of previous conditions in explaining contemporary and future ecosystem properties, demand the testing of this assumption. Vegetation resurvey databases across gradients of land use and environmental change, complemented by rigorous experiments, offer a means to test for interactions between land-use legacies and multiple environmental changes. Implementing these tests in the context of a trait-based framework will allow biologists to synthesize compositional and functional ecosystem responses. This will further our understanding of the importance of land-use legacies in determining future ecosystem properties, and soundly inform conservation and restoration management actions.
authors.affiliation: Forest & Nature Lab, Ghent University, BE-9090, Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.|Ecosystem Restoration and Intervention Ecology Research Group, School of Plant Biology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia.
authors.forename: Michael P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Perring
authors.affiliation: Forest & Nature Lab, Ghent University, BE-9090, Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.|Department of Plant Production, Ghent University, Proefhoevestraat 22, BE-9090, Melle, Belgium.
authors.forename: Pieter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: De Frenne
authors.affiliation: Forest & Nature Lab, Ghent University, BE-9090, Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.
authors.forename: Lander
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Baeten
authors.affiliation: Forest & Nature Lab, Ghent University, BE-9090, Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.
authors.forename: Sybryn L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Maes
authors.affiliation: Forest & Nature Lab, Ghent University, BE-9090, Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.
authors.forename: Leen
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Depauw
authors.affiliation: Forest & Nature Lab, Ghent University, BE-9090, Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.
authors.forename: Haben
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Blondeel
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Investigaciones Botánicas (LABIBO), Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Salta-CONICET, Av. Bolivia 5150, 4400, Salta, Argentina.
authors.forename: María M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Carón
authors.affiliation: Forest & Nature Lab, Ghent University, BE-9090, Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.
authors.forename: Kris
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Verheyen
mesh_terms: D017753:Ecosystem; D000067936:Natural Resources; D010944:Plants
keywords: climate change; forest understorey; functional traits; historical ecology; land-use history; nitrogen deposition; ozone; response-and-effect framework