Abstract
Coastal environments host plant taxa adapted to a wide range of salinity conditions. Salinity, along with other abiotic variables, constrains the distribution of coastal plants in predictable ways, with relatively few taxa adapted to the most saline conditions. However, few attempts have been made to quantify these relationships to create niche models for coastal plants. Quantification of the effects of salinity, and other abiotic variables, on coastal plants is essential to predict the responses of coastal ecosystems to external drivers such as sea level rise. We constructed niche models for 132 coastal plant taxa in Great Britain based on eight abiotic variables. Paired measurements of vegetation composition and abiotic variables are rare in coastal habitats so four of the variables were defined using community mean values for Ellenberg indicators, i.e. scores assigned according to the typical alkalinity, fertility, moisture availability and salinity of sites where a species occurs. The remaining variables were the canopy height, annual precipitation, and maximum and minimum temperatures. Salinity and moisture indicator scores were significant terms in over 80 % of models, suggesting the distributions of most coastal species are at least partly determined by these variables. When the models were used to predict species occurrence against an independent dataset 64 % of models gave moderate to good predictions of species occurrence. This indicates that most models had successfully captured the key determinants of the niche. The models could potentially be applied to predict changes to habitats and species-dependent ecosystem services in response to rising sea levels.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Batriu E, Pino J, Rovira P, Ninot JM (2011) Environmental control of plant species abundance in a microtidal Mediterranean saltmarsh. Appl Veg Sci 14:358–366
Beaumont NJ, Jones L, Garbutt A, Hansom JD, Toberman M (2014) The value of carbon sequestration and storage in coastal habitats. Estuar Coast Shelf Sci 137:32–40
Boorman LA (1992) The environmental consequences of climatic change on British salt marsh vegetation. Wetl Ecol Manag 2:11–21
Carpenter W, Goodenough AE (2014) How robust are community-based plant bioindicators? Empirical testing of the relationship between Ellenberg values and direct environmental measures in woodland communities. Community Ecology 15:1–11
Curreli A, Wallace H, Freeman C, Hollingham M, Stratford C, Johnson H, Jones L (2013) Eco-hydrological requirements of dune slack vegetation and the implications of climate change. Sci Total Environ 443:910–919
de Vries W, Wamelink GWW, van Dobben H, Kros J, Reinds GJ, Mol-Dijkstra JP, Smart SM, Evans CD, Rowe EC, Belyazid S, et al. (2010) Use of dynamic soil–vegetation models to assess impacts of nitrogen deposition on plant species composition: an overview. Ecol Appl 20:60–79
Diekmann M (2003) Species indicator values as an important tool in applied plant ecology - a review. Basic and Applied Ecology 4:493–506
Donnelly JP, Bertness MD (2001) Rapid shoreward encroachment of salt marsh cordgrass in response to accelerated sea-level rise. Proc Natl Acad Sci 98:14218–14223
Elith J, Graham CH, Anderson RP, Dudík M, Ferrier S, Guisan A, Hijmans RJ, Huettmann F, Leathwick JR, Lehmann A, et al. (2006) Novel methods improve prediction of species’ distributions from occurrence data. Ecography 29:129–151
Ellenberg H (1991) Zeigerwerte von pflanzen in Mitteleuropa. Scripta Geobotanica 18:1–248
Emery NC, Ewanchuk PJ, Bertness MD (2001) Competition and salt-marsh plant zonation: stress tolerators may be dominant competitors. Ecology 82:2471–2485
Ford H, Garbutt A, Jones DL, Jones L (2012) Impacts of grazing abandonment on ecosystem service provision: coastal grassland as a model system. Agric Ecosyst Environ 162:108–115
Grime JP, Hodgson JG (1988) Comparative plant ecology: a functional approach to common British species. Unwin Hyman, London
Hill MO, Roy DB, Mountford JO, Bunce RG (2000) Extending Ellenberg’s indicator values to a new area: an algorithmic approach. J Appl Ecol 37:3–15
Hill MO, Preston CD, Roy D (2004) PLANTATT - attributes of British and Irish plants: status, size, life history, geography and habitats. Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Abbotts Ripton
Jiménez-Valverde A (2012) Insights into the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) as a discrimination measure in species distribution modelling. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 21:498–507
Jones MLM, Wallace HL, Norris D, Brittain SA, Haria S, Jones RE, Rhind PM, Reynolds BR, Emmett BA (2004) Changes in vegetation and soil characteristics in coastal sand dunes along a gradient of atmospheric nitrogen deposition. Plant Biol 6:598–605
Jones L, Angus S, Cooper A, Doody P, Everad M, Garbutt A, Gilchrist P, Hansom J, Nicholls R, Pye K, et al (2011a) Coastal Margins. UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Understanding nature’s value to society. Technical Report. Cambridge, UK: UK National Ecosystem Assessment, UNEP-WCMC, 411–457.
Jones L, Wallace H, M Prosser (2011b) Baseline botanical monitoring and establishing permanent quadrats in embryo primary slack, Whiteford burrows, 7th and 8th July 2011. Report to the Countryside Council for Wales
Latour JB, Reiling R (1993) A multiple stress model for vegetation (‘move’): a tool for scenario studies and standard-setting. Sci Total Environ 134:1513–1526
Lobo JM, Jiménez-Valverde A, Real R (2008) AUC: a misleading measure of the performance of predictive distribution models. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 17:145–151
Lowe JAH, Reynolds B, Fowler D, Brittain SA, Hughes S (1996) Orographic enhancement of acidic deposition in snowdonia. Final report to Welsh office. Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Bangor
Malpas LR, Smart J, Drewitt A, Sharps E, Garbutt A (2013) Continued declines of redshank Tringa totanus breeding on saltmarsh in Great Britain: is there a solution to this conservation problem? Bird Study 60:370–383
Manel S, Williams HC, Ormerod SJ (2001) Evaluating presence–absence models in ecology: the need to account for prevalence. J Appl Ecol 38:921–931
Maun MA, Perumal J (1999) Zonation of vegetation on lacustrine coastal dunes: effects of burial by sand. Ecol Lett 2:14–18
Mendoza-González G, Martínez ML, Rojas-Soto OR, Vázquez G, Gallego-Fernández JB (2013) Ecological niche modeling of coastal dune plants and future potential distribution in response to climate change and sea level rise. Glob Chang Biol 19:2524–2535
Meynard CN, Quinn JF (2007) Predicting species distributions: a critical comparison of the most common statistical models using artificial species: comparison of species-distribution models. J Biogeogr 34:1455–1469
Plassmann K, Edwards-Jones G, Jones MLM (2009) The effects of low levels of nitrogen deposition and grazing on dune grassland. Sci Total Environ 407:1391–1404
Preston CD, Pearman DA, Dines TD (2002) New atlas of the British and Irish flora: An atlas of the vascular plants of Britain, Ireland, The Isle of Man and the channel islands. Oxford University Press, UK
Randin CF, Dirnböck T, Dullinger S, Zimmermann NE, Zappa M, Guisan A (2006) Are niche-based species distribution models transferable in space? J Biogeogr 33:1689–1703
Ranwell DS (1972) Ecology of salt marshes and sand dunes. Chapman and Hall, London
Real R, Barbosa AM, Vargas JM (2006) Obtaining environmental favourability functions from logistic regression. Environ Ecol Stat 13:237–245
R Foundation for Statistical Computing (2013) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria.
Rhymes J, Wallace H, Fenner N, Jones L (2014) Evidence for sensitivity of dune wetlands to groundwater nutrients. Sci Total Environ 490:106–113
Rowe EC, Emmett BA, Smart SM, Frogbrook ZL (2011) A new net mineralizable nitrogen assay improves predictions of floristic composition. J Veg Sci 22:251–261
Sing T, Sander O, Beerenwinkel N, Lengauer T (2005) ROCR: visualizing classifier performance in R. Bioinformatics 21:3940–3941
Smart SM, Henrys PA, Scott WA, Hall JR, Evans CD, Crowe A, Rowe EC, Dragosits U, Page T, Whyatt JD, et al. (2010a) Impacts of pollution and climate change on ombrotrophic Sphagnum species in the UK: analysis of uncertainties in two empirical niche models. Clim Res 45:163–177
Smart SM, Scott AW, Whitaker J, Hill MO, Roy DB, Critchley NC, Marini L, Evans C, Emmett BA, Rowe EC, et al. (2010b) Empirical realised niche models for British higher and lower plants – development and preliminary testing. J Veg Sci 21:643–656
Stace C (2010) New flora of the British isles. Cambridge University Press, UK
Swets JA (1988) Measuring the accuracy of diagnostic systems. Science 240:1285–1293
Wagner M, Kahmen A, Schlumprecht H, Audorff V, Perner J, Buchmann N, Weisser WW (2007) Prediction of herbage yield in grassland: how well do Ellenberg N-values perform? Appl Veg Sci 10:15–24
Yuan X, Ma K, Wang D (2012) Partitioning the effects of environmental and spatial heterogeneity on distribution of plant diversity in the yellow river estuary. Science China Life Sciences 55:542–550
Zelený D, Schaffers AP (2012) Too good to be true: pitfalls of using mean Ellenberg indicator values in vegetation analyses. J Veg Sci 23:419–431
Zhu G, Gao Y, Zhu L (2013) Delimiting the coastal geographic background to predict potential distribution of Spartina alterniflora. Hydrobiologia 717:177–187
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Niall Phelan from the Environment Agency for providing the extensive saltmarsh test dataset and to Annette Burden for help collecting saltmarsh datasets in the field. This study was funded by Natural Environmental Research Council Centre for Ecology & Hydrology through the Ecological Processes and Resilience Science programme; Project Code NEC04654.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic Supplementary Material
Online Resource 1
Receiver operator characteristic plots for all coastal plant niche models a) with the full model b) without the salinity term. (PDF 1.22 mb)
Online Resource 2
Table of model coefficients for 132 niche models of coastal plant species (PDF 797 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jarvis, S.G., Rowe, E.C., Henrys, P.A. et al. Empirical realised niche models for British coastal plant species. J Coast Conserv 20, 107–116 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11852-016-0422-3
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11852-016-0422-3