Land-use in Europe affects land snail assemblages directly and indirectly by modulating abiotic and biotic drivers
Abstract
Type and intensity of land‐use vary in space and time and strongly contribute to changes in richness and composition of species communities. In this study, we examined land snail communities in forests and grasslands in three regions of Germany. We aimed to quantify the extent to which snail density, diversity, and community composition in forests and grasslands are determined by (1) land‐use intensity, (2) abiotic drivers and (3) biotic substrates, and (4) whether these effects are consistent across regions. In total, we collected 15,607 snail individuals belonging to 71 species and analyzed both direct and indirect effects using structural equation modeling. Snail densities and their local diversity varied across regions and between forest and grassland habitats within a region albeit with contrasting trends. Community composition also differed among regions—more strongly in forests than in grasslands—and each habitat had unique species (18 in forests, 21 in grasslands). In general, the direct impact of land‐use on snail density, diversity, and community structure was on average nine (forests) and seven (grasslands) times lower than the impact of abiotic drivers and biotic substrates which both affected snail assemblages about equally. However, land‐use factors had indirect effects on snail responses through abiotic variables such as soil moisture and soil pH. Furthermore, land‐use factors also had indirect effects via changing biotic substrates, such as plant cover in grasslands and deadwood cover in forests. Our results show that land snails strongly respond to environmental gradients and add an important indicator taxon to the current evidence of land‐use impacts, highlighting the complexity of direct and indirect effects via biotic and abiotic drivers across regions in Central Europe.
Additional Information
© 2019 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Received 19 December 2018; revised 18 March 2019; accepted 19 March 2019. We thank the managers of the three Exploratories, Kirsten Reichel‐Jung, Iris Steitz, Sandra Weithmann, Juliane Vogt, Miriam Teuscher, and all former managers for their work in maintaining the plot and project infrastructure; Christiane Fischer for giving support through the central office; Andreas Ostrowski for managing the central database; and Markus Fischer, Eduard Linsenmair, Dominik Hessenmöller, Daniel Prati, Ingo Schöning, François Buscot, Ernst‐Detlef Schulze, and the late Elisabeth Kalko for their role in setting up the Biodiversity Exploratories project. Many thanks to all research assistants: Kevin Frank, Wiebke Kämper, Jessica Schneider, Andrea Hilpert, Matteo Trevisan, Matthias Brandt, Tewannakit Mermagen, Kathrin Ziegler, Annika Keil, Andreas Kerner, Katja Gruschwitz, and Kimberly Adam. We thank Jörg Peil from the State Office for Environment of the Schorfheide‐Chorin for providing snail data of the region; Volkmar Wolters for commenting on the manuscript; and Falk Hänsel, Stephan Wöllauer, and Thomas Nauss for the weather data and respective database tool. The work has partly been funded by the DFG Priority Program 1374 'Infrastructure‐Biodiversity‐Exploratories" (DFG BL860/8‐3). Fieldwork permits were issued by the responsible state environmental offices of Baden‐Württemberg, Thüringen, and Brandenburg (according to §72 BbgNatSchG). We acknowledge the Open Access Publishing Fund of Technische Universität Darmstadt. NB and WWW conceived the ideas. KW collected field data and determined snail species together with CR. KW, AB, NKS, and NB analyzed the data. KW and NB led the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed critically to the drafts and gave final approval for publication.Attached Files
Published - Wehner_et_al-2019-Ecosphere.pdf
Supplemental Material - ecs22726-sup-0001-appendixs1.pdf
Supplemental Material - ecs22726-sup-0002-appendixs2.pdf
Files
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 95777
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190524-085229290
- DFG BL860/8‐3
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- Technische Universität Darmstadt
- Created
-
2019-05-24Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2022-01-05Created from EPrint's last_modified field