Abstract

Semi-natural grasslands have been severely affected by agricultural land-use change. However, the isostatic land adjustment following deglaciation in the Northern Hemisphere means that new land is continually being created in coastal areas. We modelled isostatic adjustment during the last 4000 years in a region of the Baltic coast to estimate the emergence of potential grassland habitat. We also compared the alpha and beta diversity of existing managed and abandoned coastal meadows, and assessed their contribution to biodiversity at landscape scales. We estimated that half the 7866 km(2) of emerging land had the potential to become coastal meadow habitat, which is an order of magnitude larger than the total area of all valuable semi-natural grassland in the study region today. The small area of managed coastal habitat remaining was found to have a disproportionate influence on the richness of threatened species at landscape scales, but our results also show that continued management is essential for the maintenance of grassland biodiversity. Our combination of approaches identifies uplifted coastal meadows as an additional original niche for grassland plant species, while highlighting that low-intensity disturbance through grassland management is essential for the maintenance of diversity at multiple scales.

Keywords

Baltic sea; biodiversity; coastal ecosystems; grazing; isostatic rebound; shore meadow

Published in

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
2018, Volume: 285, number: 1876, article number: 20172349
Publisher: ROYAL SOC

SLU Authors

• Auffret, Alistair

  • Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Stockholm University
  • University of York

UKÄ Subject classification

Ecology


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2349

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/95115