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Species richness is a surrogate for rare plant occurrence, but not conservation value, in boreal plant communities

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Abstract

Rare species are an ecologically important component of biological communities, but may be at risk of decline as a result of human disturbance and other sources of environmental change. Rare species are also ecologically idiosyncratic, making their occurrence difficult to predict a priori, and leading to efforts to find surrogate measures of rare species occurrence to inform conservation decisions. Using floristic data collected at 602 sites in the western Canadian boreal forest, we studied relationships between rare species occurrence, species richness and habitat type, with rarity defined according to the classification system developed by Rabinowitz (in: Synge (ed) The biological aspects of rare plant conservation, Wiley, Somerset, 1981). Relative to similar studies in other temperate regions, we found that a smaller proportion of species were classified as rare in our study region, and that common species dominate the flora. Regional-scale relationships were positive between richness and the occurrence of rare species; however, due to variation in these relationships among habitat types, richness is not a suitable surrogate for a site’s conservation value with respect to species rarity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all field staff involved in the collection of data used in this manuscript, including: Kelsey Bernard, Tim Chipchar, Corrina Copp, Silvie Fojtik, Danielle Montgomery, Emony Nicholls, Amy Nixon, Melanie Patchell, Michel Rapinski, Kirsten Tereshyn, Neil Webster, and Taylor Will. Colin Twitchell and others from Innotech Alberta provided logistical support. Tyler Cobb and staff the Royal Alberta Museum provided support with taxonomy and specimen conservation. Shauna-Lee Chai, Lorna Allen, and Joyce Gould assisted with study plot design, and Susy Cote and Monica Kohler provided project management support. This project was part of a collaboration between the Ecological Committee of the Lower Athabasca, the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, and the Applied Conservation Ecology Lab at the University of Alberta. Funding: this work was supported by the Alberta Environmental Monitoring and Science Division (formally Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency).

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Correspondence to Varina E. Crisfield.

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Communicated by Daniel Sanchez Mata.

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Crisfield, V.E., Dennett, J.M., Denny, C.K. et al. Species richness is a surrogate for rare plant occurrence, but not conservation value, in boreal plant communities. Biodivers Conserv 29, 99–114 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-019-01871-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-019-01871-z

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