Unexpected understorey community development after 30 years in ancient and post‐agricultural forests

作者：Lander Baeten, Martin Hermy, Sander Van Daele, Kris Verheyen · 发表于：Journal of Ecology · 年份：2010 · DOI：10.1111/j.1365-2745.2010.01711.x · 被引用次数：88 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Forest Ecology and Biodiversity Studies、Forest Management and Policy

Summary 1. Land‐use change is considered one of the most radical and extensive disturbances that have influenced plant distributions and diversity patterns in forest understorey communities in much of Europe and eastern North America. In forests growing on former agricultural land, local species diversity and community differentiation among sites are generally reduced compared with ancient forests (i.e. forests with no historical record of agriculture). Yet, no study has determined how the compositional differences created by former land‐use change over time as the forest sites recover from former agricultural use. 2. Here, we resurveyed 78 vegetation plots (half of the plots in ancient and half in post‐agricultural forest) to demonstrate how three decades of forest development have changed the compositional differences between post‐agricultural and ancient forest sites. The impact of land‐use history and survey date was tested on two measures of species diversity and two measure of community divergence. 3. The data indicate that the imprint of former agricultural land use persisted over time, yet not through compositional stability. Parallel and strong vegetation shifts occurred in both ancient and post‐agricultural forest: the species diversity decreased and local species cover strongly diverged, which indicates community drift. The observed understorey changes did thus not support the commonly accepted model of community development in post‐agricultural forests, i.e. the d...