Detecting long‐term losses at the plant community level – arable fields in Germany revisited

Abstract

Question: The intensification of crop cultivation in much of Europe since the mid-20th century has greatly increased crop yields but caused dramatic biodiversity losses in arable fields. We investigated the extent of these losses at the level of plant community types.Location: Ten areas in central Germany with different soil/climate conditions and various arable plant communities. Methods:We compiled historical surveys of arable fields in the 1950s/early 1960s before the onset of pervasive agricultural industrialization, and in 2009 revisited 392 arable fields. Historical and recent data were compared with supervised manual classification, detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) and ANOVA.Results: Ten out of 16 plant communities at association rank observed in fields in the 1950s/1960s were not recorded again. The proportion of relev es assignable at association level decreased from 75% to 5%, while the proportion of relev es assignable only at higher syntaxon level or not assignable at all had increased from 2% to 75%. The impoverishment of vegetation was slightly less pronounced at field margins, where around one quarter of the recent relev es could be assigned to associations. Present arable plant communities in the region are species-poor and consist chiefly of common, often herbicide-tolerant, generalist species, with no clear preference for cereal vs root crops, autumn-vs springsown crops or base-rich vs base-poor soils.Conclusion: Our new approach using phytosociological syntaxa and a semipermanent plot design enabled us to quantify biodiversity losses at the community type level. The currently used set of phytosociological associations is inadequate to represent present-day arable plant assemblages. The concept of residual plant communities provides a useful methodological supplement.

Addressing species turnover and community changes in vegetation resurvey studies

“…Most of the studies focussing on community type used a single level of classification, either association (Haveman & Janssen ; Meyer et al. ) or alliance (Jandt et al. ; Chytrý et al.…”

Applied Vegetation Science in 2016: the leading journal promoting the application of vegetation science

“…Among them, the paper of Meyer et al. () is an excellent example of applied vegetation science, providing a quantitative assessment of ecosystem changes. In Europe, agricultural habitats have become an essential part of nature.…”

“…Meyer et al. () assessed the biodiversity loss in ten agricultural areas in central Germany over the last 50 yrs, in terms of plant community types that were recorded in the 1950s and 1960s but are no longer present. Despite the intrinsic limitations of such studies, such as those connected with the determination of the exact geographic position of historical phytosociological relevés, this article shows the potential of using data from traditional descriptive vegetation science to investigate long‐term changes, which would be impossible to detect with other approaches.…”

Turnover of Minerals and Organics in the Postharvest Herbage of Annuals and Perennials: Winter Wheat and Goldenrod

“…This ambiguous but indispensable performance of the pervasive agricultural industrialization is a consequent response to the needs of a growing world population in staple food, energy, and industrial products. It is paid with drastic losses in the biodiversity [3,4] and leads to soil followed by a drain of nutrients, at midlife. Proteins and nucleic acids are enzymatically degraded to phloem-mobile compounds [35][36][37] to result in N relocation rates of 40%-90% in seed crops [34].…”