The role of habitat and daily activity patterns in explaining the diversity of mountain Neotropical dung beetle assemblages

The interaction between land use and climate change is expected to strongly affect species distributions along high elevation landscapes. We aimed to test the effect of climatic variables on community metrics among five types of land use in a high elevation landscape. We described dung beetle spatia...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: da Silva, Pedro G., Lobo, Jorge M., Medina Hernández, Malva Isabel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/229469
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/229469
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Functional diversity
Scarabaeinae
Spatial pattern
Taxonomic diversity
Temporal pattern
Descripción
Sumario:The interaction between land use and climate change is expected to strongly affect species distributions along high elevation landscapes. We aimed to test the effect of climatic variables on community metrics among five types of land use in a high elevation landscape. We described dung beetle spatial and temporal taxonomic and functional diversity patterns, and partitioned β-diversity into turnover and nestedness components. The interaction between land use and daily period of activity mostly drives abundance, functional richness and functional diversity, but not dung beetle species richness. Unlike Neotropical lowlands, species richness and abundance in open environments are similar to those existing in forests. Temperature is an important predictor of abundance and functional divergence. There is a higher spatial component of the taxonomic β-diversity, which is highly driven by species turnover. The temporal component of the taxonomic β-diversity was strongly driven by nestedness, where night assemblages are sub-sets, although not entirely, of diurnal assemblages. For functional diversity, the temporal β-diversity was much higher than the spatial β-diversity, but both were similarly represented by functional group turnover and nestedness. The composition of nocturnal and diurnal assemblages is clearly different, even more than the differences observed between habitats. However, taxonomic turnover is the dominant force between sampling sites while nestedness dominates the daily pattern. This means that forest habitats are unlikely to act as shelters for grassland species under a scenario of rising temperature.