BIODIVERSITY INDICATOR GROUPS OF TROPICAL LAND‐USE SYSTEMS: COMPARING PLANTS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

By Christian H. Schulze, Matthias Waltert, Paul J. A. Kessler, Ramadhanil Pitopang, D. Veddeler, M. Mühlenberg, S. Robbert Gradstein, Christoph Leuschner, I. Steffan‐Dewenter, T. Tscharntke. 2004

504 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tropical landscapes are dominated by land-use systems, but their contribution to the conservation of biodiversity is largely unknown. Since changes in biodiversity in response to human impact are known to differ widely among taxonomic groups and guilds, there is a need for multidisciplinary collaboration of plant, vertebrate, and invertebrate experts. We used inventories of trees, understory plants, birds (subdivided into endemics, insectivores, frugivores/nectar feeders), butterflies (endemics, fruit feeders), and dung bee- tles in Sulawesi (Indonesia) to characterize a gradient from near-primary to secondary forests, agroforestry systems, and annual crops. As expected, overall species richness tended to decrease within this gradient of increasing habitat modification, but, in contrast to pre- vious studies, we found the species richness between most taxonomic groups to be signif- icantly correlated (36 out of 38 pairwise comparisons). However, on average only 48% of the variance could be explained (within the five main groups), and only a few taxonomic groups/guilds turned out to be good predictors for others: for example, trees for fruit- and nectar-feeding birds (88% explanation) and fruit-feeding butterflies (83%), endemic birds for endemic butterflies (72%), and frugivorous/nectar-feeding birds for fruit-feeding but- terflies (67%). Although biodiversity of land-use systems showed taxonomic group- and guild-specific differences, most groups were affected in a similar way by habitat modifi- cation. Near-primary forest sites proved to be of principal importance for conservation; however, land-use systems such as secondary forests (for understory plants, birds, and butterflies) and agroforestry systems (for butterflies) supported relatively high numbers of species and might play a significant role for biodiversity conservation in tropical landscapes.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/003c398008ddd290b13b27a367ac52f861ef5d15

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Non-commercial Research and Educational Use including without Limitation Use in Instruction at Your Institution, Sending It to Specific Colleagues That You Know, and Providing a Copy to Your Institution's Administrator. All Other Uses, Reproduction and Distribution, including without Limitation Comm (2005, unknown): “All these methods require considerable A u t h o r ' s p e r s o n a l”
Grassland management intensification weakens the associations among the diversities of multiple plant and animal taxa (2015, methodology): “Understanding these relationships is also of practical importance in conservation biology, as indicator taxa are commonly used to estimate wider biodiversity (Howard et al. 1998, Andelman and Fagan 2000, Schulze et al. 2004).”
FROM FOREST TO FARMLAND: HABITAT EFFECTS ON AFROTROPICAL FOREST BIRD DIVERSITY (2005, background): “…compared natural forests with modernized cacao production systems with planted exotic shade trees and annual cultures with only very few trees (Waltert et al. 2004; see also Schulze et al. 2004) also revealed a marked decrease in overall bird species richness along the studied land use gradient.”
Conserving Southeast Asian forest biodiversity in human-modified landscapes (2010, background): “Further studies in Indonesian landscapes analyze the relative role of managed versus natural habitat and the great contribution of beta diversity compared to alpha diversity (e.g. Kessler et al., 2009; Schulze et al., 2004; Tylianakis et al., 2008a).”
The challenge of maintaining Atlantic forest biodiversity: A multi-taxa conservation assessment of specialist and generalist species in an agro-forestry mosaic in southern Bahia (2009, background): “The potential of modified habitats to harbor forest species, however, varies among biological groups (Schulze et al., 2004; Pineda et al., 2005; Harvey et al., 2006; Faria et al., 2006, 2007).”
Seven Reasons Why Protists Make Useful Bioindicators (2013, background): “…a major question is how to direct conservation efforts to maximise preservation of biodiversity; the diversity of all groups cannot be feasibly studied in all areas so there is a desire to identify indicator organisms as proxies for ecosystem biodiversity (Schulze et al. 2004, Kati et al. 2004).”
Diversity and composition of Arctiidae moth ensembles along a successional gradient in the Ecuadorian Andes (2005, background): “Responses of tropical arthropod communities to habitat disturbance or successional recovery vary across taxa, guilds, and regions (Basset et al., 1998; Lawton et al., 1998; Schulze et al., 2004).”
Prospects for tropical forest biodiversity in a human-modified world. (2009, background): “…species to access critical food or breeding habitat elsewhere (e.g. in the case of frogs Becker et al. 2007), and the interaction between the habitat quality of the matrix and species-specific differences in dispersal or gap-crossing ability (e.g. Sekercioglu et al. 2002; Lees and Peres in press).”
From Forest to Farmland: Species Richness Patterns of Trees and Understorey Plants along a Gradient of Forest Conversion in Southwestern Cameroon (2006, background): “Such management would also be beneficial for other taxa: there are strong correlations between tree diversity and diversity of birds and other forest-dependent biota (Waltert et al. 2005; Schulze et al. 2004a).”
Forest use and vertical stratification in fruit-feeding butterflies of Sulawesi, Indonesia: impacts for conservation (2005, background): “…previous studies (e.g., Thomas 1991; Spitzer et al. 1993; Hill et al. 1995, 2001; Fermon et al. 2000, 2001; Hamer and Hill 2000; Ghazoul 2002; Schulze et al. 2004a), and indicates that taxonomic and geographic distinctiveness are very important additional measures when comparing biodiversity…”
Shaded Coffee and Cocoa : Double Dividend for Biodiversity and Small-scale Farmers (2017, background): “As previously discussed, shade trees positively correlate with biodiversity thereby also increasing the matrix quality on landscape level (Schulze et al., 2004).”