Habitat fragmentation, climate change, and inbreeding in plants

Abstract

Habitat fragmentation and climate change are recognized as major threats to biodiversity. The major challenge for present day plant populations is how to adapt and cope with altered abiotic and biotic environments caused by climate change, when at the same time adaptive and evolutionary potential is decreased as habitat fragmentation reduces genetic variation and increases inbreeding. Although the ecological and evolutionary effects of fragmentation and climate change have been investigated separately, their combined effects remained largely unexplored. In this review, we will discuss the individual and joint effects of habitat fragmentation and climate change on plants and how the abilities and ways in which plants can respond and cope with climate change may be compromised due to habitat fragmentation.

The role of temperature and dispersal in moss-microarthropod community assembly after a catastrophic event

“…Furthermore, our work underscores the value of undisturbed communities in the recovery of regions impacted by an extreme climatic event [44,45]. The potential for climate change to interact with habitat fragmentation has long been identified, although little community-level experimental research has been carried out to date [16,17]. Temperature-induced increases in movement rates may yield higher extinction rates where dispersal represents a risk [46].…”

“…This is especially so given (i) the growing limitations on dispersal that are being imposed by increasing habitat fragmentation, (ii) the background of changing environmental conditions under which extreme climatic events are occurring and (iii) the potential for dispersal limitation and harsh environmental conditions to negatively reinforce each other [16,17]. The planning of effective ecological restoration programmes under a changing climate demands that we understand better the process of community assembly at the landscape level [12].…”

Understanding and monitoring the consequences of human impacts on intraspecific variation

“…These negative effects can be offset, in part, when diversity within and among populations can help to buffer these problems through the so‐called portfolio effect (Leimu, Vergeer, Angeloni, & Ouborg, 2010; Moore, Yeakel, Peard, Lough, & Beere, 2014; Schindler, Armstrong, & Reed, 2015; Schindler et al., 2010). This effect predicts that higher biodiversity minimizes the overall risk in stability of ecosystem functions.…”

Genetic and environmental characterization of <em>Abies alba</em> Mill. populations at its western rear edge

“…The reduced population sizes and the habitat fragmentation of Pyrenean silver fir populations may result in reduced genetic variation, increased levels of inbreeding within populations, and also elevation genetic differentiation among populations (Young et al, 1996;Leimu et al, 2010). In fact, previous studies have shown a lower genetic variability for silver fir in the Pyrenees compared to other European fir populations using either isozymes (Konnert & Bergmann, 1995) or chloroplast microsatellites (Vendramin et al, 1999).…”