Moths and management of a grassland reserve: regular mowing and temporary abandonment support different species

Abstract

Although reserves of temperate seminatural grassland require management interventions to prevent succesional change, each intervention affects the populations of sensitive organisms, including insects. Therefore, it appears as a wise bet-hedging strategy to manage reserves in diverse and patchy manners. Using portable light traps, we surveyed the effects of two contrasting management options, mowing and temporary abandonment, applied in a humid grassland reserve in a submountain area of the Czech Republic. Besides of Macrolepidoptera, we also surveyed Microlepidoptera, small moths rarely considered in community studies. Numbers of individiuals and species were similar in the two treatments, but ordionation analyses showed that catches originating from these two treatments differed in species composition, management alone explaining ca 30 per cent of variation both for all moths and if split to Marcolepidoptera and Microlepidoptera. Whereas a majority of macrolepidopteran humid grassland specialists preferred unmown sections or displayed no association with management, microlepidopteran humid grassland specialists contained equal representation of species inclining towards mown and unmown sections. We thus revealed that even mown section may host valuable species; an observation which would not have been detected had we considered Macrolepidoptera only. Our results highlight the necessity of diversified management, including temporary abandonment, to conserve the biodiversity of grassland reserves and grasslands in general.

Large moths captures by a pest monitoring system depend on farmland heterogeneity

“…). It also agrees with Sumpich and Konvicka (), who detected changes in moth community composition attributable to grassland reserve management at a small scale of a few hectares.…”

“…Besides of moths, these observations agree with reports of higher biodiversity on heterogeneous farmlands, for example for Swedish spiders (Oberg et al 2007) and butterflies (Ekroos et al 2010), wild bees across Europe (Le Feon et al 2010), or arthropods in general (Schweiger et al 2005;Hendrickx et al 2007). It also agrees with Sumpich and Konvicka (2012), who detected changes in moth community composition attributable to grassland reserve management at a small scale of a few hectares.…”

Origin and development of long-strip field patterns: A case study of an abandoned medieval village in the Czech Republic

“…We suggest that maintaining deforested parts in combination with maintaining the pluzina hedgerows can improve habitat availability and conserve biodiversity by following the historical pattern of the landscape. Preserving this pattern could serve to maintain the connectivity of the habitat mosaic (Zimmermann et al, 2011), and could have a similar effect in conservation management as the widely used methods of establishing fence lines and nearby uncultivated patches in agricultural landscapes (Nicholls and Altieri, 2013) or temporary abandoned areas in grasslands (Šumpich and Konvička, 2012).…”

Least‐cost path analysis for urban greenways planning: A test with moths and birds across two habitats and two cities

“…Second, their sensitivity to landscape connectivity differs among species (Murgui & Hedblom, 2017; New, 2015). Finally, these two biological models can be used to test different habitat requirements: grassland‐dwelling moths prefer to move through herbaceous habitats (Alison et al., 2017; Šumpich & Konvička, 2012), whereas forest‐dwelling birds avoid crossing open areas (Tremblay & St Clair, 2011) and depend more on a continuous wooded area for nesting and foraging activities (Creegan & Osborne, 2005; St Clair, 2003). To study landscape‐dependent movement behaviours of birds, playback recall protocols are widely used.…”