Abstract
Anthropogenic land use causes global declines in biodiversity. Despite the knowledge that animal carrion is the most nutrient-rich form of dead organic matter, studies on landscape and local scales determining whether and the means by which land use intensity influences the diversity of the carrion-associated insect fauna are globally scarce. We investigated the effects of land use intensity and abiotic and biotic environmental factors on the abundance, species richness, and diversity of the important ecosystem-service-providing silphid beetle taxon (carrion beetles) in three regions of Germany. In 61 forest stands distributed over three geographically distinct regions in Central Europe, we trapped silphid beetles on exposed piglet cadavers during late summer. In all three regions, higher ambient temperatures and higher fine sand contents were associated with the abundance of the silphid beetle taxa. The carrion community silphid diversity was negatively affected by an increase in mean ambient temperature in all three regions. Although management intensity in forests did not affect the overall abundance of Silphidae, the abundance of Nicrophorus humator decreased significantly with higher forest management intensity across all three regions. Unmanaged and age-class forests showed a higher abundance of N. humator compared with extensively managed forest stands. These findings indicate that N. humator has potential as an indicator species for anthropogenic disturbances in forests. Overall, the direct responses of the silphid beetle community to diverse soil characteristics underline soil as an important factor determining the abundance and diversity of necrophagous carrion beetles in Central Europe. To protect these valuable ecosystem-service providers, forest-management-induced soil modifications need to be paid close attention.
Highlights
Increasing land use intensity and land use change are major drivers of biodiversity loss, in forest ecosystems [1,2,3]
A priori, we fitted those environmental variables with an increase of more than 50% of the mean square error—in the case of omission—together with the marked highest IncNodePurity-values in negative binomial, gamma- or GaussianGLMMs in a sequence according to their importance (Tables 1–3, after [5])
Model simplification based on Akaike information criterion AIC was performed
Summary
Increasing land use intensity and land use change are major drivers of biodiversity loss, in forest ecosystems [1,2,3]. In many forests, intensified age-class forestry has reduced the quality of the habitat and its structural heterogeneity [5]. The homogenization of such anthropogenically influenced ecosystems on the landscape scale, whereby species assemblages become increasingly dominated by a small number of widespread species, is one of the main threats to biodiversity [6,7]. The above indicates that land use type and intensity affects the diversity of insects, including that of forest-dwelling carrion insect communities; this in turn might have a negative impact on the important ecosystem services, such as carcass removal rate and nutrient cycling, carried out by these insects [9,10]
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