FIELD MARGINS PLANT ASSEMBLAGES - VARIATION PARTITIONING BETWEEN LOCAL AND LANDSCAPE FACTORS

It is hypothesized that plant diversity in field margins can be influe nced by field margin structure and management, factors related to adja cent land use and factors related to landscape structure. To test this hypothesis, the plant species composition of field margins in three h edgerow network landscapes differing in grain size, hedgerow connectiv ity and land use patterns were compared. Variation partitioning by par tial canonical correspondence analysis was used to assess the relative weight of local and landscape factors in total variation explained. R esults showed that the three sets of local factors and the landscape f actor were all significant. We conclude that the plant species composi tion of field margins is determined by landscape scale variation in en vironment attributes, and discuss implications for conservation.