Studia botanica hungarica

Author(s): Török, P. & Tóthmérész, B.
Title: Levels of biodiversity insurance: species dispersal, establishment, filtering and assembly in a changing world – glimpses of an ecologist engaged to limnology
Year: 2025
Volume: 56
Pages: 155-168.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17110/StudBot.2025.56.1.155

Abstract: To address the response of ecosystems to global change it is a pivotal task to study the dynamics of communities that structure natural and semi-natural ecosystems. We highlighted new aspects of spatial insurance theory (ecosystem functionality and stability are enhanced by high biodiversity) by introducing three levels of biodiversity insurance: i) landscape-level insurance, ii) habitat-level insurance, and iii) temporal insurance. Based on the above introduced three-level-scheme of biodiversity insurance we identified and summarised several research directions and questions which could be considered in future research. For the better understanding of landscape-level insurance of biodiversity, it is important to quantify the habitat-specific species pools of several terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, both at the local and landscape-scale. Considering the biodiversity insurance at the habitat level, it is vital to analyse the effect of abiotic and biotic filtering on species and functional diversity both in terrestrial and aquatic communities, and also to analyse how the effects of habitat level filtering processes are influenced by different levels of stress and disturbance. Finally, considering the temporal insurance of biodiversity it is important to determine how species traits interact with temporal biodiversity filters and use that knowledge to predict how species assemblages respond to a range of filter combinations.
Keywords: phytoplankton, community dynamics, ecological memory, functional trait, intermediate disturbance hypothesis, spatial insurance
Subject: biology, ecology, botany

Journal: Studia botanica hungarica
Journal abbreviation: Studia bot. hung.
ISSN: 0301-7001
Publisher: Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest
Editor(s): Papp, B., Buczkó, K., B-Béres, V. & Stenger-Kovács, Cs.