Data from: Species-habitat networks reveal conservation implications that other community analyses do not detect

Grassland restoration is an important conservation intervention supporting
declining insect pollinators in threatened calcareous grassland
landscapes. While the success of restoration is often quantified using
simple measures of diversity or similarity to a target communities, these
measures do not capture fundamental aspect of community reconstruction.
Here, we develop species-habitat networks that aim to define habitat level
foraging dependencies of pollinators across restored grassland landscapes
and compare their value to these more conventional measures of community
restoration. We assessed this across Salisbury Plain (UK) which represents
the largest area of chalk grassland in N.W. Europe, encompassing six
distinct management types aimed at restoration and maintenance of
species-rich calcareous grassland. Sites that were previously disturbed or
reverting from arable agriculture were comparable in their pollinator
abundance and species richness to those of ancient grasslands, although
intensively managed grasslands supported low pollinator diversity.
Applying our species-habitat network approach we found that pollinator
communities in grasslands recovering from past military disturbance showed
stronger modular associations with those in ancient grasslands compared to
areas recovering from intensive agriculture. This highlights the
importance of habitat history in shaping restoration trajectories. We
propose that species-habitat networks should be part of the standard
analytical toolkit assessing the effectiveness of restoration at landscape
scale, particularly for mobile species such as insects.

草原恢复是一项重要的保护干预措施，可支持受威胁的钙质草原（calcareous grassland）景观中数量下降的传粉昆虫。虽然恢复的成功与否常通过多样性的简单指标或与目标群落的相似性来量化，但这些指标并未捕捉到群落重建的基本方面。在此，我们构建了物种-栖息地网络（species-habitat networks），旨在明确恢复草原景观中传粉昆虫对栖息地层面的取食依赖，并将其价值与这些更传统的群落恢复指标进行比较。我们在英国索尔兹伯里平原（Salisbury Plain）开展了评估，该区域是西北欧最大的白垩草原（chalk grassland）区域，涵盖六种旨在恢复和维持物种丰富的钙质草原的不同管理类型。先前受干扰或从耕地恢复的站点，其传粉昆虫丰度和物种丰富度与古老草原相当，但集约管理的草原传粉昆虫多样性较低。应用我们的物种-栖息地网络方法，我们发现，与从集约农业恢复的区域相比，从过去军事干扰恢复的草原中的传粉昆虫群落与古老草原的群落具有更强的模块关联。这凸显了栖息地历史在塑造恢复轨迹中的重要性。我们建议，物种-栖息地网络应成为评估景观尺度恢复有效性的标准分析工具包的一部分，尤其对于昆虫等移动物种而言。