Animal taxa contrast in their scale-dependent responses to land use change in rural Africa

Human-dominated landscapes comprise the bulk of the world's terrestrial surface and Africa is predicted to experience the largest relative increase over the next century. A multi-scale approach is required to identify processes that maintain diversity in these landscapes. Here we identify scales at which animal diversity responds by partitioning regional diversity in a rural African agro-ecosystem between one temporal and four spatial scales. Human land use practices are the main driver of diversity in all seven animal assemblages considered, with medium sized mammals and birds most affected. Even the least affected taxa, bats and non-volant small mammals (rodents), responded with increased abundance in settlements and agricultural sites respectively. Regional turnover was important to invertebrate taxa and their response to human land use was intermediate between that of the vertebrate extremes. Local scale (< 300 m) heterogeneity was the next most important level for all taxa, highlighting the importance of fine scale processes for the maintenance of biodiversity. Identifying the triggers of these changes within the context of functional landscapes would provide the context for the long-term sustainability of these rapidly changing landscapes.S1 Table. List of bat species, families and foraging groups recorded from manual identifications of a random subset of four sites (two nights each) per village, and the codes given to species-groups defined for subsequent automated identification with minimal overlap in call parameters using scans and filters in Analook v. 4.1t, 2015 (Titley Electronics, www. hoarybat.com). Single asterisk denotes species which were identified very rarely using manual identification but not detected from automated scans. Double asterisk denotes one species which was not manually detected in the sub-sampled sites but detected unequivocally with the automated scans.S2 Table. Proportion of total richness contributed by alpha and beta components for all seven taxa based on individual- and sample-based partitioning respectively.S1 Fig. Response of animal communities to three land use types: Croplands, settlements, and rangelands in a rural landscape using two response variables, (a) abundance and (b) richness. All values were standardized for comparison to represent standard deviations from the mean. Whiskers represent the range, boxes the first and third quartiles, dark lines the median and isolated circles are outliers.S1 File. R-script and associated R output of PERMANOVA analyses for acousticallyobtained (SM2 bat detectors, Wildlife Acoustics) abundance data for 13 species-groups of bats using Bray-Curtis distance. Analyses were conducted in R using the ªveganº, ªcarº and ªMASSº packages. Species group codes and foraging associations (open-air, clutter and clutter- edge; Schoeman & Jacobs, 2008)) are explained in S1 Table.German Federal Government, BMBF (SPACES programme: Limpopo Living Landscapes project); National Research Foundation (NRF); Department of Science & Technology (DST) through the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) Chair on Biodiversity Value and Change in the Vhembe Biosphere Reserve, hosted; University of Venda; Sasol Agriculture Trust; Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung; University of Venda [SMNS/17/Zoo/01]; International Foundation for Science [D/4984-2]; Centre for Invasion Biologyhttp://www.plosone.orgam2018Centre for Wildlife Managemen