PARENT SESSION
Poster Session 19: Biodiversity
Wednesday, August 10, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM, Exhibit Hall 220 A-E, Level 2, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Effects of climate, habitat, soil and geographical location on multi-species richness of boreal agricultural landscapes.
Kivinen, Sonja*,1, 2, Luoto, Miska1, Kuussaari, Mikko1, 1 Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki, Finland2 University of Turku, Turku, Finland
ABSTRACT- Understanding spatial variation in species richness requires the examination of multiple factors acting at biogeographical, landscape and local levels. We studied the relative role of environmental factors and geographical location in determining species richness of plants, butterflies, day-active macromoths and bees in boreal agricultural landscapes. To examine the effects of climate, habitat, soil and spatial variables on species richness, we created generalized linear mixed models using data from 136 squares of 0.25 km2 located in southern Finland. Further, we partitioned the explained variation in species richness into the purely environmental fraction, the spatially structured environmental fraction and the purely spatial fraction. Our results show that species richness of all taxa was positively associated with temperature. Species richness of plants and butterflies was also strongly related to habitat characteristics. The effect of soil was negligible for all taxa. The largest part of the explained variation in all taxa was related to the pure effect of geographical location and to somewhat lesser extent to spatially structured environmental variables. In conclusion, climate and habitat characteristics were important determinants of species richness. However, the results indicated that the majority of explained variation in species richness is attributable to geographical location. Our results highlight that even on landscape scale geographical context should be taken into account in biodiversity studies.
Key words: species richness, variation partitioning, modelling, agriculture