The environmental consequences of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity have been studied both in natural and controlled experiments. Regardless, the long-term data needed to predict the persistence of species in these fragmented habitats is yet unavailable. From previous studies, a broad range of responses is understood to contribute to the detriment of ecosystems. However, in experiments which control for habitat amount, it was shown that the spatial arrangement of the remnant habitats could mitigate the impacts of habitat loss. The spatial structure may explain the persistence of naturally discontinuous communities, despite the extent of suitable habitat expected to be insufficient for the long-term survival. We use plant community data from naturally fragmented dry prairies to ask: Can we discern the ecological strategies that support the persistence of these distinct communities despite the relatively small and isolated nature of these remnants? We extracted plant community data from published surveys within Illinois, sourced species trait data from various online databases, and calculated fragmentation metrics using ArcGIS on publicly available spatial datasets. These datasets were analyzed simultaneously through a double-inertia analysis referred to as RQL analysis. We first determined those axes that summarized the majority of the covariance in the ordination for landscape traits and then use a correlative test between the axes and the traits. From this comparison, we will identify traits commonly associated and thus filtered by specific landscape variables.
Results/Conclusions
Results suggest that when you control for habitat amount, the two axes that capture most of the variance in our landscape data are spatial configurational metrics associated with the arrangement of habitats and metrics related to distance and dispersion. Therefore, our analysis can explore traits associated with the long-term persistence of some species in these remnants based on these two axes. The spatial configuration axis related strongly to traits such as the capacity for clonal reproduction, a suite of seed dormancy strategies, and where a species falls in the wetland specialist-to-generalist spectrum. Conversely, the ordination axis that encompassed distance related metrics strongly correlated to the seed mass, reproductive height, phenological range, and the dispersal syndromes the species exhibited. This analytical method bridges the gap between the functional traits of species and landscape-level spatial patterns. It provides a straightforward way of elucidating which plant strategies may help promote the long-term persistence of some species in fragmented dry grasslands and may help identify species that lack these strategies and need more attention.