Plant species redundancy and the restoration of faunal habitat: Lessons from plant-dwelling bugs

Abstract

Restoring disturbed lands is essential for conserving biodiversity. In floristically diverse regions, restoring all plant species following anthropogenic disturbance is financially costly and it is unknown if this can be achieved. However, re-creating faunal habitat may not require reinstating all plant species if there is a high degree of redundancy. Here, we assess whether there is redundancy among a subset of native plant species chosen to restore fauna habitat following a severe disturbance. Additionally, we determine if reestablished plants support similar faunal assemblages as the same plant species in less disturbed forest. We sampled plant-dwelling Hemiptera from 1,800 plants across 16 species. We found 190 species of Hemiptera, with most plant species in the forest having distinct hemipteran assemblages.