Publication details
Comparison of plant and snail diversity patterns in the White Carpathian Mts (Czech Republic) across forest and grassland habitats
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Biologia |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/biolog-2015-0054 |
| Field | Ecology |
| Keywords | environmental factors; gastropods; geographical patterns; variation partitioning; vascular plants; woodlands |
| Description | The White Carpathian (Bílé Karpaty) Mountains belong to the best-explored areas of the Czech Republic for both land snails and vascular plants, providing a unique opportunity for cross-taxa comparison of their diversity patterns. A total of 1,181 plant and 101 snail species, recorded in 45 grid cells of 2.8 × 3.1 km in size, were used for the analysis. We aimed to investigate the responses of forest and grassland assemblages separately, and to determine relative roles of environmental and spatial predictors for the compositional variation. We observed no significant correlation between the number of plant and snail species across the cells. While land snails showed a negative response to human-made habitats, a positive response was found for plants due to a high proportion of species confined to disturbed and ruderal habitats. Such differences can be attributed to different species pools of forest and grassland species and a high sensitivity of most land snails to habitat degradation and deforestation. In contrast, a positive correlation was found between grassland species as both groups positively responded to the same variables related to habitat diversity. Using the variance partitioning approach, we found a notably higher importance of spatial variables for grassland and forest plant assemblages, in contrast to snail assemblages, which were driven mainly by environmental conditions. These differences emerged especially for grasslands, most likely due to a long-term survival of several relict steppe plants and a notably higher species pool of grassland plants than that of snails. |