Download Conserving biodiversity in human landscapes - patterns in time and space

Conserving biodiversity in human landscapes - patterns in time and
space.
S. J. WATSON
1
Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution, La Trobe University,
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3086
†
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
The earth is increasingly becoming dominated by human-affected land-cover. Conservation
of biodiversity relies on strategies which allow biodiversity to persist in these ‘human
landscapes’. My research aims to determine how human land-covers, and changes of these
land-covers, affect ecological processes and biodiversity. Here, I highlight the potential of
human land-covers to support a significant amount of biodiversity and maintain key
ecosystem functions. I elaborate on this work, showing that the spatial arrangement of
human land-covers can significantly affect landscape function for a suite of parrots, including
the threatened eastern regent parrot Polytelis anthopeplus monarchoides. Our
contemporaneous research demonstrates that many production landscapes experience
regular land-cover changes (e.g. changing crop types in agricultural land) that can drive
changes in the diversity and composition of the ecosystem. Moreover, the temporal pattern
of land-cover-changes is shifting, with a notable increase in the frequency of changes. It is
likely that the temporal characteristics of land changes (i.e. the sequence, frequency and
time-span of land-cover change) will affect ecosystems over and above the effects of a
contemporary change. Our research highlights that conservation of biodiversity will be most
successful where land-management strategies consider the interacting effects of the spatial
arrangement of human land-covers and the temporal processes of land-cover changes on
ecological communities.
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