Immigration credit of temperate forest herbs in fragmented landscapes – implications for restoration of habitat connectivity

1. In many agricultural landscapes, it is important to restore networks of forests to provide habitat and stepping stones for forest specialist taxa. More knowledge is, however, needed on how to facilitate the immigration of such taxa in restored forest patches. Here, we present the first chronosequence study to quantify the dynamics of immigration credits of forest specialist plants in post-arable forest patches.

2. We studied the distribution of herbaceous forest specialist plant species in 54 post-arable broadleaved forest patches along gradients of age (20-140 years since forest establishment), distance from ancient forest (0-2600 m) and patch area (0.5-9.6 ha). With Linear Mixed Models we estimated the effects of these factors on species richness, patch means of four dispersal-related plant traits and with Generalized Linear Models on the occurrence of 20 individual species.

3. Post-arable forest patch age and spatial isolation from ancient forest, but not patch size, were im...