Positive and negative effects of land abandonment on butterfly communities revealed by a hierarchical sampling design across climatic regions

Abstract

Land abandonment may decrease biodiversity but also provides an opportunity for rewilding. It is therefore necessary to identify areas that may benefit from traditional land management practices and those that may benefit from a lack of human intervention. In this study, we conducted comparative field surveys of butterfly occurrence in abandoned and inhabited settlements in 18 regions of diverse climatic zones in Japan to test the hypotheses that species-specific responses to land abandonment correlate with their climatic niches and habitat preferences. Hierarchical models that unified species occurrence and their habitat characteristics revealed that negative responses to land abandonment were associated with species having cold climatic niches utilizing open habitats, suggesting that traditional land use by human had long mitigated climate warming since the last glacier maximum through creating non-forest open habitats. Maps representing species gains and losses due to land abandonment, which were created from the model estimates, showed similar geographic patterns, but some parts of areas exhibited high species losses relative to gains. A hierarchical trait-based approach presented here revealed to be useful for scaling up local-scale effect of land abandonment to a macro-scale assessment, which is crucial to developing spatial conservation strategies in the era of depopulation.

Scalable phylogenetic Gaussian process models improve the detectability of environmental signals on extinction risks for many Red List species

“…This is consistent with the point that urban expansion has long had a devastating impact on the extinction of various species (Czech et al, 2000;McKinney, 2006). It is likely that no trend was observed in agricultural lands because they are mosaic environments with a variety of species with different life history traits (Bennett et al, 2006;Graham et al, 2019;Sugimoto et al, 2022). Similarly, wastelands contain various types of secondary grassland and shoreline vegetation (Akasaka et al, 2014), which may have affected various species in a phylogenetic manner.…”

Positive and negative effects of land abandonment on butterfly communities revealed by a hierarchical sampling design across climatic regions

“…The datasets, program codes and model predictions shown in figure 4 and electronic supplementary material, figures S2, S3 and S4 are available from the Dryad Digital Repository ( [ 73 ]), except specific records of endangered species.…”