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Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes
In the intensively farmed, homogenous agricultural landscape of the North China Plain, family graveyards form distinct cultural landscape features. In addition to their cultural value, these graveyards represent semi-natural habitat islands whose potential roles in biodiversity conservation and ecol...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7820468/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33479321 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80362-6 |
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author | Gong, Cheng Li, Liangtao Axmarcher, Jan C. Yu, Zhenrong Liu, Yunhui |
author_facet | Gong, Cheng Li, Liangtao Axmarcher, Jan C. Yu, Zhenrong Liu, Yunhui |
author_sort | Gong, Cheng |
collection | PubMed |
description | In the intensively farmed, homogenous agricultural landscape of the North China Plain, family graveyards form distinct cultural landscape features. In addition to their cultural value, these graveyards represent semi-natural habitat islands whose potential roles in biodiversity conservation and ecological functioning has remained poorly understood. In this study, we investigated plant species richness on 199 family graveyards of different ages and sizes. In accordance with biogeography theory, both overall and insect-pollinated plant species richness increased with area and age of graveyards. Even small graveyards show a strong potential for conserving local plant richness, and a mosaic of both large and small family graveyards could play an important role in the conservation of farmland biodiversity and related ecosystem functions. The launch of agri-environmental measures that conserve and create semi-natural habitats, in turn benefitting agricultural biodiversity and ecological functioning, has proven difficult in China due to the shortage of dispensable arable land. Given the great value of family graveyards as semi-natural habitats reflected in our study, we propose to focus preliminary efforts on conserving these landscape features as existing, widespread and culturally important semi-natural habitat islands. This would represent an effective, complementary policy to a subsequent re-establishment of other semi-natural habitats for the conservation of biodiversity and ecological functioning in agricultural landscapes. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7820468 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-78204682021-01-26 Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes Gong, Cheng Li, Liangtao Axmarcher, Jan C. Yu, Zhenrong Liu, Yunhui Sci Rep Article In the intensively farmed, homogenous agricultural landscape of the North China Plain, family graveyards form distinct cultural landscape features. In addition to their cultural value, these graveyards represent semi-natural habitat islands whose potential roles in biodiversity conservation and ecological functioning has remained poorly understood. In this study, we investigated plant species richness on 199 family graveyards of different ages and sizes. In accordance with biogeography theory, both overall and insect-pollinated plant species richness increased with area and age of graveyards. Even small graveyards show a strong potential for conserving local plant richness, and a mosaic of both large and small family graveyards could play an important role in the conservation of farmland biodiversity and related ecosystem functions. The launch of agri-environmental measures that conserve and create semi-natural habitats, in turn benefitting agricultural biodiversity and ecological functioning, has proven difficult in China due to the shortage of dispensable arable land. Given the great value of family graveyards as semi-natural habitats reflected in our study, we propose to focus preliminary efforts on conserving these landscape features as existing, widespread and culturally important semi-natural habitat islands. This would represent an effective, complementary policy to a subsequent re-establishment of other semi-natural habitats for the conservation of biodiversity and ecological functioning in agricultural landscapes. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-01-21 /pmc/articles/PMC7820468/ /pubmed/33479321 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80362-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Gong, Cheng Li, Liangtao Axmarcher, Jan C. Yu, Zhenrong Liu, Yunhui Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes |
title | Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes |
title_full | Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes |
title_fullStr | Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes |
title_full_unstemmed | Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes |
title_short | Family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in China's agricultural landscapes |
title_sort | family graveyards form underappreciated local plant diversity hotspots in china's agricultural landscapes |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7820468/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33479321 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80362-6 |
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