The effects of Land-use History and Landscape Context on Habitat Naturalness: An Assessment Using Relative Naturalness Indicator Values

László Erdős^1, , Martin Magnes¹ and Zoltán Bátori²

¹Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

²Department of Ecology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary

Cite this paper:
László Erdős, Martin Magnes and Zoltán Bátori. The effects of Land-use History and Landscape Context on Habitat Naturalness: An Assessment Using Relative Naturalness Indicator Values. Applied Ecology and Environmental Sciences. 2015; 3(5):146-150. doi: 10.12691/aees-3-5-4

Abstract

Nature conservation issues concerning temperate forest-steppes are among the most interesting and challenging issues in current ecology. A considerable proportion of the Pannonian biogeographical region was covered by forest-steppes prior to intensive human impacts, but most of these forest-grassland mosaics have disappeared or suffered some modifications. Century-long grazing activity enabled the continuous existence of grasslands, but woody vegetation diminished or disappeared from large areas, both in highland and lowland forest-steppes. With the cessation of grazing, forest patches started to regenerate. Forest patches in the highland forest-steppes had a better regeneration potential, because propagule sources were available in the immediate vicinity. In contrast, forest patches of the lowland forest-steppes had a considerably worse chance to recover, since propagule sources were lacking in extremely large areas. In this study, we compared the naturalness of the forest and grassland components in a highland and a lowland forest-steppe reserve, in order to understand how land-use history and landscape context influenced their present state. We used the ability of plant species to indicate the degradation of their habitat. We estimated the percentage cover of the plant species within permanent plots, and, using their indicator scores, we computed mean naturalness values for the plots. Grasslands proved to have higher naturalness values than forests (although the difference was significant for the lowland forest-steppe only). This may be explained by the continuous history of the grasslands, and the discontinuous history of the forests. In addition, we found that the forest component of the highland site was more natural than that of the lowland site, which may be attributed to the better regeneration capacity of the highland site, due to the nearby propagule sources. We conclude that lowland forest-steppe remnants may serve as “stepping-stones” for the regeneration of those forest-steppes that are located farther away from potential propagule sources.

Keywords:
forest-steppe regeneration Pannonian biogeographical region vegetation mosaic degradation

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