Abstract
Although there is increasing interest in the effects of habitat disturbance on community attributes and the potential consequences for ecosystem functioning, objective approaches linking biodiversity loss to functional loss are uncommon. The objectives of this study were to implement simultaneous assessment of community attributes (richness, abundance and biomass, each calculated for total-beetle assemblages as well as small- and large-beetle assemblages) and three ecological functions of dung beetles (dung removal, soil perturbation and secondary seed dispersal), to compare the effects of habitat disturbance on both sets of response variables, and their relations. We studied dung beetle community attributes and functions in five land-use systems representing a disturbance gradient in the Brazilian Amazon: primary forest, secondary forest, agroforestry, agriculture and pasture. All response variables were affected negatively by the intensification of habitat disturbance regimes, but community attributes and ecological functions did not follow the same pattern of decline. A hierarchical partitioning analysis showed that, although all community attributes had a significant effect on the three ecological functions (except the abundance of small beetles on all three ecological functions and the biomass of small beetles on secondary dispersal of large seed mimics), species richness and abundance of large beetles were the community attributes with the highest explanatory value. Our results show the importance of measuring ecological function empirically instead of deducing it from community metrics.
Highlights
The relevance of assessing ecological functions in conservationoriented studies is becoming increasingly recognized [1,2,3,4,5]
Primary forest was the land-use system with the highest number of species recorded (33), followed by secondary forest (17), agroforest (16), agriculture (13) and pasture (3)
Some studies have found that some types of secondary forests and/or agroforests are able to maintain high values for some dung beetle community attributes [19], in the present study these land-use systems had significantly impoverished dung beetle communities and ecological functions
Summary
The relevance of assessing ecological functions in conservationoriented studies is becoming increasingly recognized [1,2,3,4,5]. Studies have reported that dung removal and burial by dung beetles has many beneficial ecological consequences, such as soil fertilization and aeration [10], improved nutrient cycling and uptake by plants [11], increase in pasture quality [12], biological control of pest flies and intestinal parasites [13] and secondary seed dispersal [14]. Some of these ecological functions can be considered to be ecosystem services, because of their potentially large economic importance and positive impacts on human well-being [15,16]
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