University of Bayreuth and BayCEER, Department Animal Ecology I, Universitaetsstr. 30, D-95440, Bayreuth, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2019 Sep 23;9(1):13712. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-49555-6.
Coastal ecosystems suffer substantially from the worldwide population growth and its increasing land demands. A common approach to investigate anthropogenic disturbance in coastal ecosystems is to compare urbanized areas with unaffected control sites. However, the question remains whether different types of anthropogenic disturbance that are elements of an urbanized area have the same impact on beach ecosystems. By investigating small islands that are utilized for tourism, inhabited by the local population, or remained completely uninhabited, we disentangled different anthropogenic disturbances and analysed their impacts on hermit crabs as indicator species. We observed a negative impact on abundance on tourist islands and a negative impact on body size on local islands. In comparison to the uninhabited reference, both disturbances had an overall negative impact. As both forms of disturbance also impacted the underlying food resource and habitat availability differently, we propose that the findings from our study approach are valid for most obligate beach species in the same system. This demonstrates that in urbanized areas, the coastal ecosystem is not always impacted identically, which emphasizes the importance of considering the particular type of anthropogenic disturbance when planning conservation action in urbanized areas.
沿海生态系统受到世界人口增长及其对土地需求不断增加的严重影响。一种常用的方法是将城市化地区与未受影响的对照地区进行比较，以研究沿海生态系统中的人为干扰。然而，问题仍然是城市化地区的不同类型的人为干扰是否对海滩生态系统产生相同的影响。通过研究用于旅游、当地居民居住或完全无人居住的小岛，我们可以理清不同的人为干扰，并分析它们对寄居蟹等指示物种的影响。我们发现，旅游岛上的寄居蟹数量减少，当地岛上的寄居蟹体型变小。与无人居住的参照岛屿相比，这两种干扰都对寄居蟹造成了负面影响。由于这两种干扰形式对基础食物资源和栖息地的可用性也有不同的影响，因此我们认为，本研究结果对于同一系统中的大多数强制性海滩物种是有效的。这表明，在城市化地区，沿海生态系统并不总是受到相同的影响，这强调了在城市化地区规划保护行动时，考虑特定类型的人为干扰的重要性。
