The effect of peatland drainage and restoration on Odonata species richness and abundance.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Elo, Merja Penttinen, Jouni Kotiaho, Janne S
Abstract	BackgroundRestoration aims at reversing the trend of habitat degradation, the major threat to biodiversity. In Finland, more than half of the original peatland area has been drained, and during recent years, restoration of some of the drained peatlands has been accomplished. Short-term effects of the restoration on peatland hydrology, chemistry and vegetation are promising but little is known about how other species groups apart from vascular plants and bryophytes respond to restoration efforts.ResultsHere, we studied how abundance and species richness of Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) respond to restoration. We sampled larvae in three sites (restored, drained, pristine) on each of 12 different study areas. We sampled Odonata larvae before restoration (n = 12), during the first (n = 10) and the third (n = 7) year after restoration and used generalized linear mixed models to analyze the effect of restoration. Drained sites had lower abundance and species richness than pristine sites. During the third year after restoration both abundance and species richness had risen in restored sites.ConclusionsOur results show that Odonata suffer from drainage, but seem to benefit from peatland restoration and are able to colonize newly formed water pools already within three years after restoration.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12898-015-0042-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC4412142&blobtype=pdf
Journal	BMC Ecology [BMC Ecol]
Volume Number	15
DOI	10.1186/s12898-015-0042-z
PubMed Central reference number	PMC4412142
PubMed reference number	25888218
e-ISSN	14726785
Language	English
Publisher	BioMed Central
Publisher Date	2015-04-09
Publisher Place	London
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. © Elo et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015
Subject Keyword	Ecological restoration Disturbance Mire Dragonfly Biodiversity
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Environmental Science Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics