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Land-use change in the past 40 years explains shifts in arthropod community traits

Martinez-Nunez, Carlos; Gossner, Martin M.; Maurer, Corina; Neff, Felix; Knop, Eva; Luka, Henryk; Cahenzli, Fabian and Albrecht, Matthias (2024) Land-use change in the past 40 years explains shifts in arthropod community traits. Journal of Animal Ecology, online, pp. 1-14.

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Document available online at: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2656.14062


Summary in the original language of the document

1. Understanding how anthropogenic activities induce changes in the functional traits of arthropod communities is critical to assessing their ecological consequences. However, we largely lack comprehensive assessments of the long-term impact of global-change drivers on the trait composition of arthropod communities across a large number of species and sites. This knowledge gap critically hampers our ability to predict human-driven impacts on communities and ecosystems.
2. Here, we use a dataset of 1.73 million individuals from 877 species to study how four functionally important traits of carabid beetles and spiders (i.e. body size, duration of activity period, tolerance to drought, and dispersal capacity) have changed at the community level across ~40 years in different types of land use and as a consequence of land use changes (that is, urbanisation and loss of woody vegetation) at the landscape scale in Switzerland.
3. The results show that the mean body size in carabid communities declined in all types of land use, with particularly stronger declines in croplands compared to forests. Furthermore, the length of the activity period and the tolerance to drought of spider communities decreased in most land use types. The average body size of carabid communities in landscapes with increased urbanisation in the last ~40 years tended to decrease. However, the length of the activity period, the tolerance to drought, and the dispersal capacity did not change significantly. Furthermore, urbanisation promoted increases in the average dispersal capacities of spider communities. Additionally, urbanisation favoured spider communities with larger body sizes and longer activity periods. The loss of woody areas at the landscape level was associated with trait shifts to carabid communities with larger body sizes, shorter activity periods, higher drought tolerances and strongly decreased dispersal capacities. Decreases in activity periods and dispersal capacities were also found in spider communities.
4. Our study demonstrates that human-induced changes in land use alter key functional traits of carabid and spider communities in the long term. The detected trait shifts in arthropod communities likely have important consequences for their functional roles in ecosystems.


EPrint Type:Journal paper
Keywords:body size, carabid beetles, dispersal capacity, phenology, spiders, tolerance to drought, urbanisation, Abacus, FiBL25095
Agrovoc keywords:
Language
Value
URI
English
Carabidae
http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_23906
English
Beetles -> Coleoptera
http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_1747
English
drought tolerance
http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_14914
English
agroecology
http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_92381
Subjects:"Organics" in general
Environmental aspects > Biodiversity and ecosystem services
Research affiliation: Spain > CSIC (Spanish National Research Council)
Switzerland > ETHZ - Agrarwissenschaften
Switzerland > FiBL - Research Institute of Organic Agriculture Switzerland > Sustainability > Nature conservation
Switzerland > FiBL - Research Institute of Organic Agriculture Switzerland > Sustainability > Agroecology
Switzerland > FiBL - Research Institute of Organic Agriculture Switzerland > Sustainability > Biodiversity > Functional agrobiodiversity
Switzerland > Zürich University
Switzerland > Other organizations Switzerland
DOI:10.1111/1365-2656.14062
Related Links:https://www.fibl.org/en/themes/projectdatabase/projectitem/project/1999
Deposited By: Forschungsinstitut für biologischen Landbau, FiBL
ID Code:52943
Deposited On:22 Mar 2024 08:44
Last Modified:22 Mar 2024 08:53
Document Language:English
Status:Published
Refereed:Peer-reviewed and accepted

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