Effects of Land Use Change on Wildlife Communities and Ecological Interactions Across Human-Dominated Landscapes

Abstract

Land use change is the main cause of current biodiversity loss as natural habitat is transformed into agricultural, urban and other human land uses at unprecedented scales globally. Beyond its direct effect on reducing the number of species and their abundance, land use change transforms the interactions between species, the structure of food webs and trophic relationships which govern ecosystem functioning. This review compiles global evidence on how land use change influences the composition of communities and interactions between species in wild animal communities using large-scale biodiversity compilations, food web manipulations, and syntheses for specific taxa. In the most disturbed environments globally, there is substantial reduction in species richness and abundance locally compared to the undisturbed baseline levels. This effect of land use change is selective in nature, favouring disturbance-adapted generalists over many specialists. Apart from the reduction of biodiversity, land use change modifies the network of interactions among species in such a way that it alters food web structure despite minimal variation in species richness and pollinator activity, and vertebrates’ community structure leading to higher numbers of species that can act as hosts to zoonotic pathogens. The removal of large bodied predators in human-altered landscapes leads to the alteration of trophic cascade effects throughout several food web levels. All these factors show that human-induced changes in land use modify not only the identity of the species but also their interactions in the human-affected landscapes.