Speaker
Description
Agricultural fields are a habitat type which can exhibit a high amount of biodiversity depending on the management intensity. They have come under increasing pressure due to the intensification of management practices like pesticide application or fertilization. While it is understood that intensification has a negative effect on the biodiversity of this habitat, it is not clear how the drivers impact plants on an individual level. The respective change happens over long time scales, which makes experimental or “space for time” approaches unlikely to accurately describe the underlying processes. Herbaria, with their large collections of current and historical plant specimens offer a promising solution to this issue. Novel spectroscopy methods allow for the extraction of chemical plant traits without altering herbarium specimens themselves. Additionally, large-scale datasets are now available, which allow us to use the herbarium specimens as base to which both functional trait and distribution data can be tied, and analyzed over a span of decades and even centuries. In this study, we selected specimens from 36 species sampled from agricultural field sites in the herbaria of Jena and Görlitz. Functional traits were measured using near-infrared spectroscopy, and occurrence data was added from the sMon dataset. A general decline in occurrence of the 36 plant species studied was observed. There was a significant positive connection between high values of traits indicating an “acquisitive”, fast-growth strategy, and high or increasing occurrence. Grasses show high values in both regards, whereas typical and iconic agricultural field species like Centaurea cyanus or Consolida regalis are among the slow-growth, low-occurrence cluster of species. Our results indicate that declining agricultural field species are likely unable to capitalize on increased nutrient availability due to fertilization and are as a result outcompeted by faster-growing plant species or the crops themselves.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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