Kathrin Litza

Universität Bremen | Uni Bremen · Institute of Ecology

Hedgerows are semi-natural wooded habitats and an important element in agricultural landscapes across Western and North Western Europe. They reduce erosion, function as carbon sinks and thus provide essential ecosystem services. Moreover, they form a structurally diverse ecosystem for numerous taxa and connect otherwise fragmented forest habitats....

Questions How do contrasting environmental conditions among forests and hedgerows affect the vegetative and reproductive performance of understorey forest herbs in both habitats? Can hedgerows support reproductive source populations of forest herbs, thus potentially allowing progressive dispersal of successive generations along the linear habitats?...

ContextHedgerows are highly important for maintaining the biodiversity in deforested landscapes. Especially for habitat specialists such as several forest plants they can provide important refuge habitats.Objectives This study aims to examine whether there is an extinction debt for forest plants in hedgerows.Methods In a study area in Northern Germ...

Linear landscape elements such as hedgerows and road verges have the potential to mitigate the adverse effects of habitat fragmentation and climate change on species, for instance, by serving as a refuge habitat or by improving functional connectivity across the landscape. However, so far this hypothesis has not been evaluated at large spatial scal...

Hedgerows have the potential to facilitate the persistence and migration of species across landscapes, mostly due to benign microclimatic conditions. This thermal buffering function may become even more important in the future for species migration under climate change. Unfortunately, there is a lack of empirical studies quantifying the microclimat...

Questions Are recent hedgerows less rich in forest vascular plants than ancient hedgerows? Does the proximity to potential source populations influence the forest species richness in recent hedgerows? Is there a difference in the dispersal potential of forest specialists found in recent and ancient hedgerows? How similar is the species composition...

Resurveying is a powerful approach to investigate responses of plant species communities to a changing environment. We present a resurvey of hedgerows from the “Knick” landscape of eastern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. The original survey was done by H. E. Weber in 1967 and new data from totally 51 semi-permanent plots was sampled in 2015. Hedgerows...

River corridor plants are an ecologically very diverse group but similar in their distribution as they are constrained to the basins of large rivers. The group contains a high number of endangered species due to the change and destruction of their habitat, mainly by the alternation of river dynamics and intensification of agriculture. To evaluate t...

Distribution and ecology of the Belgian gagea (Gagea spathacea). Gagea spathacea is a forest vascular plant with an exceptionally small distributional range. As the species is comparatively widespread in the northern parts of Germany the country has a high responsibility for ins conservation. Our study aimed to examine in which communities and unde...