Dataset Information

Prairie dog decline reduces the supply of ecosystem services and leads to desertification of semiarid grasslands.

ABSTRACT: Anthropogenic impacts on North American grasslands, a highly endangered ecosystem, have led to declines of prairie dogs, a keystone species, over 98% of their historical range. While impacts of this loss on maintenance of grassland biodiversity have been widely documented, much less is known about the consequences on the supply of ecosystem services. Here we assessed the effect of prairie dogs in the supply of five ecosystem services by comparing grasslands currently occupied by prairie dogs, grasslands devoid of prairie dogs, and areas that used to be occupied by prairie dogs that are currently dominated by mesquite scrub. Groundwater recharge, regulation of soil erosion, regulation of soil productive potential, soil carbon storage and forage availability were consistently quantitatively or qualitatively higher in prairie dog grasslands relative to grasslands or mesquite scrub. Our findings indicate a severe loss of ecosystem services associated to the absence of prairie dogs. These findings suggest that contrary to a much publicize perception, especially in the US, prairie dogs are fundamental in maintaining grasslands and their decline have strong negative impacts in human well - being through the loss of ecosystem services.

SUBMITTER: Martinez-Estevez L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3793983 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Prairie dog decline reduces the supply of ecosystem services and leads to desertification of semiarid grasslands.

Martínez-Estévez Lourdes L Balvanera Patricia P Pacheco Jesús J Ceballos Gerardo G

PloS one 20131009 10

Anthropogenic impacts on North American grasslands, a highly endangered ecosystem, have led to declines of prairie dogs, a keystone species, over 98% of their historical range. While impacts of this loss on maintenance of grassland biodiversity have been widely documented, much less is known about the consequences on the supply of ecosystem services. Here we assessed the effect of prairie dogs in the supply of five ecosystem services by comparing grasslands currently occupied by prairie dogs, gr ...[more]

PMID: 24130691

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Project description:Prairie dogs (Cynomys sp.) are considered keystone species and ecosystem engineers for their grazing and burrowing activities (summarized here as disturbances). As climate changes and its variability increases, the mechanisms underlying organisms' interactions with their habitat will likely shift. Understanding the mediating role of prairie dog disturbance on vegetation structure, and its interaction with environmental conditions through time, will increase knowledge on the risks and vulnerability of grasslands.Here, we compared how plant taxonomical diversity, functional diversity metrics, and community-weighted trait means (CWM) respond to prairie dog C. mexicanus disturbance across grassland types and seasons (dry and wet) in a priority conservation semiarid grassland of Northeast Mexico.Our findings suggest that functional metrics and CWM analyses responded to interactions between prairie dog disturbance, grassland type and season, whilst species diversity and cover measures were less sensitive to the role of prairie dog disturbance. We found weak evidence that prairie dog disturbance has a negative effect on vegetation structure, except for minimal effects on C4 and graminoid cover, but which depended mainly on season. Grassland type and season explained most of the effects on plant functional and taxonomic diversity as well as CWM traits. Furthermore, we found that leaf area as well as forb and annual cover increased during the wet season, independent of prairie dog disturbance.Our results provide evidence that grassland type and season have a stronger effect than prairie dog disturbance on the vegetation of this short-grass, water-restricted grassland ecosystem. We argue that focusing solely on disturbance and grazing effects is misleading, and attention is needed on the relationships between vegetation and environmental conditions which will be critical to understand semiarid grassland dynamics under future climate change conditions in the region.

Dataset Information

Prairie dog decline reduces the supply of ecosystem services and leads to desertification of semiarid grasslands.

Publications

Prairie dog decline reduces the supply of ecosystem services and leads to desertification of semiarid grasslands.

Similar Datasets

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