Abstract
Abstract
Historical land use can leave long-lasting spatial legacies in forest ecosystems, but mobile vertebrates may respond more strongly to present habitat availability than to conditions in any particular past decade. We tested how multi-decadal forest-cover persistence is associated with forest-specialist woodpecker richness in four Natura 2000 forest sites in Brașov, Romania. Seven woodpecker species were surveyed at 52 fixed points, including five forest specialists and two forest generalists. Forest cover was reconstructed for six periods from the 1970s to the 2020s and quantified within 100, 250, 500, and 1000 m buffers around each survey point. Decade-specific linear regressions described associations between specialist richness and forest cover, while principal component analysis summarized the strongly correlated multi-decadal cover variables. Specialist richness was positively associated with forest cover at the 100 m scale in all six periods, with individual models explaining approximately 11–13% of the variation, whereas no significant relationships were detected at broader scales. PC1 explained 92.4% of the variation among decadal cover variables and represented a persistent forest-cover amount gradient. Specialist richness declined as PC1 increased (p = 0.010, R² = 0.13), meaning that locations with consistently more forest supported more specialist species; PC2 was not significant. These results indicate that locally persistent forest habitat is more informative than assigning ecological importance to any single historical decade. For management, historical cover maps are most useful when combined with current habitat amount and stand-level structural attributes such as large trees and deadwood.