Habitat specificity of patches in modern agricultural landscapes

Habitat specificity analysis provides a tool for partitioning landscape species diversity on landscape elements by separating patches with many rare specialist species from patches with the same number of species, all of which are common generalists and thus provide information of relevance to conservation goals at regional and national levels. Our analyses were based upon species data from 2201 patch elements in SE Norwegian modern agricultural landscapes. The context used for measuring habitat specificity strongly influences the results. In general the gamma diversity contribution and core habitat specificity calculated from the patch data set were correlated. High values for both measures were observed for woodland, pastures and road verges whereas midfield islets and boundary transitional types were ranked low, as opposed to findings in traditional, extensively managed agricultural landscapes. This is due to our study area representing intensively used agricultural landscape elements holding a more trivial species composition, in addition to ruderals being favoured by fertility and disturbance, a finding also being supported by the semi-natural affiliation index. Results obtained by use of checklist data from the same study area diverged from patch data. Caution is needed in interpretation of habitat specificity results obtained from checklist data, because modern agricultural landscapes contain several land types which are seldom surveyed by botanists, thus being under-represented in the data set. We propose the use of core habitat specificity and gamma diversity contribution in parallel to obtain a value neutral diversity assessment that addresses patch uniqueness and other properties of conservation interests.