Where to develop agriculture and forestry? Perspective from studies on animal communities in grasslands and subtropical forests of the southern Neotropics

BELLOCQ, M.I.; ZURITA, G.A.; FILLOY, J

Congreso; 27th International Comgress in Conservation Biology; 2015

Each human activity that requires large extensions of land imposes a particular environmental filter to the species regional pool. Our general objective is to contribute to land use planning that considers biodiversity conservation in the context of native ecosystems, cultural values and local and regional socioeconomic scenarios. Here, we analyze how similarity in the composition of animal communities is influenced by agriculture and forestry depending on the native ecosystem in which the human activity is developed. In the study design we considered two widely used indicator taxa (birds and ants) from two contrasting conservation priority biomes in the southern Neotropics (southern Atlantic forest and Pampean grassland) and extended human-created habitats (eucalypt plantations and soybean cropfields). We used an integrated approach to study community differentiation considering three complementary facets of beta diversity (taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic), which are only recently being incorporated in conservation objectives. Non-metric multidimensional scaling showed that taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic differentiation in composition between bird and ant assemblages were associated to biome and land-use; study sites grouped into four groups on the bi-dimensional space (cropfields in forest and grassland, and tree plantations in forest and grassland), and that was consistent across beta diversity facets and taxa.  Mantel and PERMANOVA tests showed that the three facets of beta diversity were positively correlated for both bird and ant assemblages Tree plantations retained more bird native species when developed in forest than in grassland biomes, whereas cropfields held more native species in grasslands than in forests. In economies depending on human activities that require large areas, our results help to select the most appropriate biome to develop agriculture and forestry, contributing to sound land use planning and beta-diversity conservation.