Plant communities in land-use systems of coastal Ecuador: diversity patterns, endemism, and species turnover at landscape scale
Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Fragmentation and destruction of once continuous natural vegetation are major threats to biological diversity. Since preservation of biodiversity can not only be realized through the establishment of protected areas, conservation efforts should also focus on human-intervened landscapes with a potentially high biodiversity value. In a highly replicated study of two tropical landscapes, using five land-use types (forest, abandoned coffee, coffee agroforestry, pasture, and rice) with six (in one landscape) and 12 replicates (the other landscape) per land-use type, the effect of management practices on plant diversity was evaluated.The results show that plant diversity was mainly determined by the heterogeneity at large spatial scales, and forest recovery was stimulated by the presence of agroforestry systems. A further study and analyses should reveal the mechanisms responsible for the high diversity in heterogenous landscapes. A study of species distribution patterns revealed that the response of herbaceous plant communities to land-use activities were mainly influenced by specific traits that determine their range sizes. Further, the combination of theories on intraspecific aggregation and the trade-off between colonization and competition to explain species coexistences in the different land-use types is discussed.In conclusion, the results suggest that agroecosystems and other human-intervened habitat types should not be disregarded in conservation planning to preserve regional plant diversity in tropical areas.
Author: Lozada Montero, Tannya Lorena
Language: English
Subfield: Nature and Landscape Conservation
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W2251928638