TY - JOUR

T1 - The relative influence of different landscape attributes on dung beetle communities in the Brazilian Atlantic forest

AU - Bezerra De Souza, Thamyrys

AU - Machado Franca, Filipe

AU - Barlow, Jos

AU - Dodonov, Pavel

AU - Santos, Juliana S.

AU - Faria, Deborah

AU - Baumgarten, Júlio E.

PY - 2020/10/1

Y1 - 2020/10/1

N2 - Land-use change is considered the greatest threat to biodiversity worldwide. As such, identifying the drivers that shape biological communities is crucial for enhancing conservation strategies in human-modified tropical landscapes. We used a hybrid patch-landscape design and a multi model inference approach to assess the relative impacts of forest loss, increased edge density and increased pasture cover on dung beetle functional groups in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest – a biodiversity hotspot. Our findings provide novel empirical evidence showing that edge density can be a major driver for dung beetles when compared to forest and pasture cover at the landscape scale. However, forest and pasture cover also influenced some dung beetle responses, supporting the idea that biological communities are negatively affected by habitat loss and changes in land cover. We found that dung beetle body size, protibia area and metatibia length were all larger in landscapes with increased edge density, reinforcing the need for further studies exploring which mechanisms could favour the presence of larger dung beetles in fragmented tropical landscapes. Taken together, these results suggest the need of conservation and management strategies focused on the protection of the remaining Atlantic Forest fragments, and the promotion of forest recovery and reduction in the pasture cover and edge density at the landscape-level.

AB - Land-use change is considered the greatest threat to biodiversity worldwide. As such, identifying the drivers that shape biological communities is crucial for enhancing conservation strategies in human-modified tropical landscapes. We used a hybrid patch-landscape design and a multi model inference approach to assess the relative impacts of forest loss, increased edge density and increased pasture cover on dung beetle functional groups in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest – a biodiversity hotspot. Our findings provide novel empirical evidence showing that edge density can be a major driver for dung beetles when compared to forest and pasture cover at the landscape scale. However, forest and pasture cover also influenced some dung beetle responses, supporting the idea that biological communities are negatively affected by habitat loss and changes in land cover. We found that dung beetle body size, protibia area and metatibia length were all larger in landscapes with increased edge density, reinforcing the need for further studies exploring which mechanisms could favour the presence of larger dung beetles in fragmented tropical landscapes. Taken together, these results suggest the need of conservation and management strategies focused on the protection of the remaining Atlantic Forest fragments, and the promotion of forest recovery and reduction in the pasture cover and edge density at the landscape-level.

KW - Anthropogenic landscape

KW - Deforestation

KW - Invertebrates

KW - Land-use change

KW - Scarabaeinae

KW - Tropical forests

U2 - 10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106534

DO - 10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106534

M3 - Journal article

VL - 117

JO - Ecological Indicators

JF - Ecological Indicators

SN - 1470-160X

M1 - 106534

ER -