Super-regional land-use change and effects on the grassland specialist flora.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30150739.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-05991-y and PMC identifier 6110833.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Habitat loss through land-use change is the most pressing threat to biodiversity worldwide. European semi-natural grasslands have suffered an ongoing decline since the early twentieth century, but we have limited knowledge of how grassland loss has affected biodiversity across large spatial scales. We quantify land-use change over 50-70 years across a 175,000 km<sup>2</sup> super-region in southern Sweden, identifying a widespread loss of open cover and a homogenisation of landscape structure, although these patterns vary considerably depending on the historical composition of the landscape. Analysing species inventories from 46,796 semi-natural grasslands, our results indicate that habitat loss and degradation have resulted in a decline in grassland specialist plant species. Local factors are the best predictors of specialist richness, but the historical landscape predicts present-day richness better than the contemporary landscape. This supports the widespread existence of time-lagged biodiversity responses, indicating that further species losses could occur in the future.