Halme et al. (2013) Biological Conservation

Panu Halme, Péter Ódor, Morten Christensen, Andrej Piltaver, Mirjam Veerkamp, Ruben Walleyn, Irén Siller, Jacob Heilmann-Clausen (2013): The effects of habitat degradation on metacommunity structure of wood-inhabiting fungi in European beech forests. Biological Conservation 168: 24–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.08.034


Abstract
Intensive forest management creates habitat degradation by reducing the variation of forest stands in general, and by removing old trees and dead wood in particular. Non-intervention forest reserves are commonly believed to be the most efficient tool to counteract the negative effects on biodiversity, but actual knowledge of the conservation efficiency is limited, especially for recent reserves. The structure of ecological communities is often described with measures of nestedness, beta diversity and similarity between communities. We studied whether these measures differ among forest reserves with different management histories. For this purpose, we used a large data set of wood-inhabiting fungi collected from dead beech trees in European beech-dominated forest reserves. The structure of fungal assemblages showed high beta diversity, while nestedness and similarity was low. During the decomposition process of trees beta diversity between the communities occupying different trees increased in natural, but not in previously managed sites. Effects of management and decay process on nestedness were complex. We argue that the detected differences most likely reflect historical effects which have extirpated specialized species from the local species pools in managed sites, and resulted in more homogeneous communities in managed sites. It is alarming that community structure is affected the most in the latest decay stages where the decay process turns the dead wood into litter, and which is thus the interface between the wood decay and the litter-decaying ecosystem. The effects of simplified communities in late decay stages on soil biodiversity should be studied.


Keywords
Beta diversity, Decay stage, Forest management, Nestedness, SDR simplex, Similarity

Ökológus Tea, 2013 őszi program

Szeretettel várjuk programjainkra! 
Minden előadás előtt küldök meghívót a levelezési 
lista tagjainak. A listára itt lehet jelentkezni. 

2013. szeptember 30, 16 óra

Podani János (ELTE Növényrendszertani, Ökológiai és Elméleti Biológiai Tsz.):

Új megközelités ökológai adatok struktúrájának feltárásához

2013. október 7, 16 óra

Hubai András és Oborny Beáta (ELTE Növényrendszertani, Ökológiai és Elméleti Biológiai Tsz.):Átkelni vagy maradni? - a növekedő növény optimális válasza a folthatárra

2013. október 14, 16 óra

Buczkó Krisztina és Magyari Enikő (Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum, Növénytár):
Kovavázas algák szinkron válaszai a környezeti változásokra

2013. október 21, 16 óra

Bán Miklós (Debreceni Egyetem, Evolúciós Állattani és Humánbiológiai Tanszék) 
két rövidebb előadást tart:
1) Szabadon használható adatbázis keretrendszer biológiai térképi adatok számára
2) Egy újabb trükk a kakukk-gazda kapcsolatban

2013. november 4, 16 óra

Liker András (Pannon Egyetem, Limnológiai Intézeti Tanszék): 

A felnőttkori ivararány és a szaporodási viselkedés kapcsolata madaraknál

2013. november 18, 16 óra

Engloner Attila (ELTE Növényrendszertani, Ökológiai és Elméleti Biológiai Tsz.):

2013. november 25, 16 óra

Gallé László (Szegedi Egyetem, Ökológiai Tanszék)

2013. december 2, 16 óra

Lengyel Attila (ELTE Növényrendszertani, Ökológiai és Elméleti Biológiai Tsz.)

Helyszín: ELTE TTK, Lágymányosi Campus 
   Budapest XI. ker, Pázmány P. stny. 1/c = Déli Tömb, 
   7. emelet 206. terem (a Dunával ellentétes oldalon)

Okologus Tea, link: https://sites.google.com/site/okologustea/

Cunning et al. (2013) Ecography

Cumming, S., Stralberg, D., Lefevre, K., Sólymos, P., Bayne, E., Fang, S., Fontaine, T., Mazerolle, D., Schmiegelow, F. & Song, S. (2013): Climate and vegetation hierarchically structure patterns of songbird distribution in the Canadian boreal region. Ecography, 36: in press. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0587.2013.00299.x, URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2013.00299.x/abstract


Abstract
Environmental factors controlling the distribution and abundance of boreal avifauna are not fully understood, limiting our ability to predict the consequences of a changing climate and industrial development activities underway. We used a compilation of avian point-count data, collected over 1990–2008 from nearly 36 000 locations, to model the abundance of individual forest songbird species within the Canadian boreal forest. We evaluated 30 vegetation and 101 climatic variables, representing most of the widely-used dimensions of climate space, along with less usual measures of inter-annual variability. Regression tree models allowed us to calculate the relative importance of climate and vegetation variable classes according to avian migration strategy without the need for a priori variable selection or dimension reduction. We tested for hierarchical habitat selection by formulating hypotheses on the locations of variables within the model tree structures. Climate variables explained the majority (77%) of deviance explained over 98 species modelled. As may be expected at high latitudes, we found energy availability (temperature, 65%) to be more important than moisture availability (precipitation, 12%). The contributions of inter- and intra-annual climate variability (28%) were about half that of mean conditions. The relatively large contribution of remotely-sensed vegetation metrics (23%) highlighted the importance of local vegetation heterogeneity controlled by non-climatic factors. The two most important vegetation variables were landcover type and April leaf area index. When selected, these generally occurred in a model's right subtree, consistent with predictions from hierarchical habitat selection theory. When occupying the root node, landcover effectively delineated the historical forest-prairie ecotone, reflecting the current disequilibrium between climate and vegetation due to human land use. Our findings suggest a large potential for avian distributional shifts in response to climate change, but also demonstrate the importance of finer scale vegetation heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of boreal birds.