Climate-induced forest dieback drives compositional changes in insect communities that are more pronounced for rare species

Sire, Lucas, Yáñez, Paul Schmidt, Wang, Cai, Bézier, Annie, Courtial, Béatrice, Cours, Jérémy, Fontaneto, Diego, Larrieu, Laurent, Bouget, Christophe, Thorn, Simon, Müller, Jörg, Yu, Douglas W., Monaghan, Michael T., Herniou, Elisabeth A. and Lopez-Vaamonde, Carlos (2022) Climate-induced forest dieback drives compositional changes in insect communities that are more pronounced for rare species. Communications Biology, 5 (1). ISSN 2399-3642

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Abstract

Species richness, abundance and biomass of insects have recently undergone marked declines in Europe. We metabarcoded 211 Malaise-trap samples to investigate whether drought-induced forest dieback and subsequent salvage logging had an impact on ca. 3000 species of flying insects in silver fir Pyrenean forests. While forest dieback had no measurable impact on species richness, there were significant changes in community composition that were consistent with those observed during natural forest succession. Importantly, most observed changes were driven by rare species. Variation was explained primarily by canopy openness at the local scale, and the tree-related microhabitat diversity and deadwood amount at landscape scales. The levels of salvage logging in our study did not explain compositional changes. We conclude that forest dieback drives changes in species assemblages that mimic natural forest succession, and markedly increases the risk of catastrophic loss of rare species through homogenization of environmental conditions.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: medicine (miscellaneous),biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology(all),agricultural and biological sciences(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2700/2701
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Organisms and the Environment
Related URLs:
Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 27 Jan 2022 13:30
Last Modified: 15 May 2023 00:43
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/83183
DOI: 10.1038/s42003-021-02968-4

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