Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands

Abstract 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 d...

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Autores principales:	Sebastian Steibl, Christian Laforsch
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Nature Portfolio 2019
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/b96a5df82f0b4e74970d60db6f9c9e5a
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:b96a5df82f0b4e74970d60db6f9c9e5a2021-12-02T15:09:20ZDisentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands10.1038/s41598-019-49555-62045-2322https://doaj.org/article/b96a5df82f0b4e74970d60db6f9c9e5a2019-09-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49555-6https://doaj.org/toc/2045-2322Abstract 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.Sebastian SteiblChristian LaforschNature PortfolioarticleMedicineRScienceQENScientific Reports, Vol 9, Iss 1, Pp 1-8 (2019)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Sebastian Steibl Christian Laforsch Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands
description	Abstract 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.
format	article
author	Sebastian Steibl Christian Laforsch
author_facet	Sebastian Steibl Christian Laforsch
author_sort	Sebastian Steibl
title	Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands
title_short	Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands
title_full	Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands
title_fullStr	Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands
title_full_unstemmed	Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands
title_sort	disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands
publisher	Nature Portfolio
publishDate	2019
url	https://doaj.org/article/b96a5df82f0b4e74970d60db6f9c9e5a
work_keys_str_mv	AT sebastiansteibl disentanglingtheenvironmentalimpactofdifferenthumandisturbancesacasestudyonislands AT christianlaforsch disentanglingtheenvironmentalimpactofdifferenthumandisturbancesacasestudyonislands
_version_	1718387835476639744

Disentangling the environmental impact of different human disturbances: a case study on islands

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