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Community Ecology

, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp 227–233 | Cite as

Penetration of weeds into the herbaceous understorey and soil seed bank of a Turkey oak-sessile oak forest in Hungary

  • G. Koncz
  • P. TörökEmail author
  • M. Papp
  • G. Matus
  • B. Tóthmérész
Article
First Online:

Abstract

Intensification of land use in the last few decades resulted in an increased rate of fragmentation of natural forest habitats. With decreased patch size but increased total borderline length the influence of the surroundings also increased. The extent of influence is especially crucial where the forest stands are adjacent to agricultural lands. We studied the vegetation (cover) and seed bank (soil samples, seedling emergence) along adjacent stands of an abandoned vineyard and edge and interior of an oak forest community (Quercetum petraeae-cerris) widespread in Central-Europe, using five transects (16 m2 plots along each transect). We asked the following questions: (i) How do vegetation and seed bank composition differ between the vineyard and forest interior and (ii) which weeds are able to penetrate into the forest herbaceous understorey vegetation and seed banks from the vineyard? In total, 15 phanaerophytes and 147 herbs were detected. Negatively associated with canopy shading, herb cover proved the lowest in the forest inferior. Few weeds and other ruderals recorded in vineyard penetrated into the forest interior. Mean seed density decreased one order of magnitude from the vineyard to the forest interior (from 20,831 to 2,159 seed/m2). The seed banks of the abandoned vineyard and edge and forest interior were dominated by ruderals, but decreasing proportion of weeds was detected from the vineyard to the forest interior. Characteristic forest herbs possessed at most sparse seed banks. Our results suggest that high canopy cover mitigates the negative impact of surrounding weedy vegetation on the forest herb layer. Therefore, the effect of surroundings is detectable mostly in the seed banks. We can assume that the formation of an increased ruderal herb cover can be foreseen if canopy opens, because the local propagule sources of forest species are missing from vegetation and soil seed banks.

Keywords

Field margin Forest herbs Invasion Plant strategy Ruderal species 

Abbreviations

SBT

Social Behaviour Types

R

ruderals

RC

ruderal competitors

AC

adventive competitors

W

short-lived weeds

DT

disturbance tolerants

G

generalists

C

competitors

S

specialists

NP

natural pioneers

NMDS

Non-metric Multidimensional Scaling

SBD

seed bank density

MC

mean cover

Nomenclature

Simon (2000) 
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© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 2019

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Authors and Affiliations

  • G. Koncz
    • 1
  • P. Török
    • 1
    Email author
  • M. Papp
    • 2
  • G. Matus
    • 2
  • B. Tóthmérész
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of EcologyUniversity of DebrecenDebrecenHungary
  2. 2.Department of BotanyUniversity of DebrecenDebrecenHungary

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