Identifying causal factors underlying vegetation changes in wet heathlands

Abstract To develop a predictive ecosystems model in a changing environment, it is important to require causal knowledge of the most important ecosystem process. More specifically, it is important to identify the causal environmental factors that drive vegetation changes in natural and semi-natural habitats managing and preserving ecosystems. In this study, we investigate spatio-temporal co-occurrence patterns between temporal changes in plant abundance data and possible causal environmental factors across multiple sites in wet heathlands. We explore two novel similarity measurement methods for temporal trends and environmental factors for assessing the potential influence of spatial proximity and specific environmental variables. Our results reveal several findings. First, close geographic proximity of wet heathland sites shows little association with vegetation change, suggesting the need to explore other influencing factors. Second, we observe a potential association between temporal correlation and environmental factors in specific instances, highlighting the need for further investigation. Furthermore, we identify significant Granger causality relationships at specific sites, highlighting overall productivity measured by NDVI as a potential causal factor for driving species vegetation changes in wet heathlands. Lastly, we identify a pattern where observation sites with high temporal and environmental similarity are often located near the coastline, suggesting potential maritime influences. These results underscore the complexity of ecosystem–environment interactions and emphasize the importance of analyzing comprehensive spatio-temporal environmental and ecological data when investigating causality.