PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 75: Biodiversity II.
Presiding: K Kirkman
Thursday, August 7. 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM, SITCC Meeting Room 100.
Functional diversity of herbaceous and shrubby plants in countryside landscapes of southern Costa Rica.
Mayfield, Margaret*,1, Ackerly, David1, Daily, Gretchen1, 1 Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
ABSTRACT- In recent years, increasing attention has been directed toward the study of human mediated biodiversity loss in the tropics. However, most of these studies focus on species richness and composition without considering other dimensions of diversity. One dimension of growing interest to the scientific and conservation communities is functional diversity. Unlike species richness, studies of community functional diversity can provide valuable information about ecosystem processes and resource pools available to other organisms in the community. For example, the presence of fleshy fruits may be of major importance to the survival of certain bird and mammal species in deforested areas regardless of the species producing the fruits. Knowledge of functional diversity is extremely valuable for understanding the ecological importance of individual species in vulnerable communities and will improve our understanding of how ecosystems are changing in human-altered landscapes. In this study we examine the functional diversity of herbaceous and shrubby plant communities in 10 common habitats in human-dominated landscapes of southern Costa Rica. These habitats include pasture, roadside vegetation and primary forest. We focus on simple physiological traits such as leaf area, growth form and SLA, as well as plant traits associated with animal activities including pollination, seed dispersal and herbivory. We ask two basic questions: 1) has functional diversity been lost or gained in deforested habitats of southern Costa Rica? And 2) does the level of redundancy in the functional traits found in forested and deforested habitats differ? We found that most deforested habitats had fewer functional traits present than forested habitats. However, the abundance of species with specific functional traits was generally higher in deforested than in forested habitats.
Key words: functional diversity, costa rica, tropical deforestation, herbaceous plants