Species pools in cultural landscapes – niche construction, ecological opportunity and niche shifts

Abstract

This paper discusses the ecology of species that were favoured by the development of the cultural landscape in central and NW Europe beginning in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, with a focus on mechanisms behind species responses to this landscape transformation. A fraction of species may have maintained their realized niches from the pre‐ agricultural landscape and utilized similar niches created by the landscape transformation. However, I suggest that many species responded by altering their niche relationships, and a conceptual model is proposed for this response, based on niche construction, ecological opportunity and niche shifts. Human‐mediated niche construction, associated with clearing of forests and creation of pastures and fields promoted niche shifts towards open habitats, and species exploited the ecological opportunity provided by these created environments. This process was initially purely ecological, i.e. the new habitats must have been included in the original fundamental niche of the species. Two other features of human‐mediated niche construction, increased interconnectivity and increased spatial stability of open habitats, resulted in species accumulating in the habitats of the constructed landscape. As a consequence, selection processes were initiated favouring traits promoting fitness in the constructed landscape. This process implied a feed‐back to niche shifts, but now also including evolutionary changes in fundamental niches. I briefly discuss whether this model can be applied also to present‐day anthropogenic impact on landscapes. A general conclusion is that ecological and evolutionary changes in species niches should be more explicitly considered in modeling and predictions of species response to present‐day landscape and land‐use changes.

Historical and Current Niche Construction in an Anthropogenic Biome: Old Cultural Landscapes in Southern Scandinavia

“…In addition to the introduction of artificial fertilizers, livestock fodder now became produced on crop fields. Large areas of meadows were transformed to either In some recent papers, the historical development of cultural landscapes in Scandinavia has been examined from the perspective of human niche construction [27,28]. These studies constitute a starting point for this paper.…”

“…Between the Neolithic and pre-industrial times (i.e., before the modernization of agriculture described above), humans constructed niche space for numerous wild species, contributing to building a species pool that presently is associated with the old agricultural landscape dominated by open or semi-open grasslands and forest-grassland mosaics. This niche construction had four major components [27]: (i) forests were opened by clearing and burning; (ii) the created open/semi-open habitats were spatio-temporally stabilized by increasingly permanent human settlements; (iii) this stabilization promoted dispersal (particularly of plants) and local population persistence; (iv) due to harvesting hay-meadows, feeding harvested fodder to livestock and spreading livestock manure into cropland, the nutrient dynamics was altered so that fast-growing competitive plants were held back on land not used for crops. Meadows were extensive and cropland relatively small, so this effectively translocated nutrients from grasslands promoting species co-existence over large areas of semi-natural grasslands.…”

“…In some recent papers, the historical development of cultural landscapes in Scandinavia has been examined from the perspective of human niche construction [27,28]. These studies constitute a starting point for this paper.…”

Human Niche Construction and the Rural Environment

“…Riede, 2011;Smith, 2011), and the development of agricultural practices . The effects of human niche construction on the distribution of species and the composition of plant communities have been discussed in the context of Scandinavian seminatural grasslands (Eriksson, 2013). These grasslands and grassland-forest mosaics, pastures and meadows are the product of human management from the time infieldoutland systems started to appear (Berglund et al, 1991a;Eriksson and Cousins, 2014).…”

The manager dilemma: Optimal management of an ecosystem service in heterogeneous exploited landscapes

“…Some species delivering ecosystem services may be unaffected or even be favored by human activities within an agricultural landscape (Eriksson, 2012). In such instances, economical and ecological benefits are positively correlated, and the optimal solution is to devote the whole landscape to the considered activity.…”