Abstract
Although the impacts of urbanisation on biodiversity are well studied, the precise response of some invertebrate groups remains poorly known. Dung-associated beetles are little studied in an urban context, especially in temperate regions. We considered how landscape heterogeneity, assessed at three spatial scales (250, 500 and 1000 m radius), mediates the community composition of coprophilous beetles on a broad urban gradient. Beetles were sampled using simple dung-baited traps, placed at 48 sites stratified across three distance bands around a large urban centre in England. The most urban sites hosted the lowest abundance of saprophagous beetles, with a lower mean body length relative to the least urban sites. Predicted overall species richness and the richness of saprophagous species were also lowest at the most urban sites. Ordination analyses followed by variation partitioning revealed that landscape heterogeneity across the urban gradient explained a small but significant proportion of community composition. Heterogeneity data for a 500-m radius around each site provided the best fit with beetle community data. Larger saprophagous species were associated with lower amounts of manmade surface and improved grassland. Some individual species, particularly predators, appeared to be positively associated with urban or urban fringe sites. This study is probably the first to examine the response of the whole coprophilous beetle community to urbanisation. Our results suggest that the response of this community to urbanisation matches expectations based on other taxonomic groups, whilst emphasising the complex nature of this response, with some smaller-bodied species potentially benefitting from urbanisation.
Highlights
Urbanisation is among the foremost threats to biodiversity, with an increasing proportion of the global human population living in cities (United Nations 2014)
The canonical correspondence analysis in any case usefully illustrates the character of landscapes that host different assemblages of coprophilous beetles, even if all the relationships described are not directly causal. This is probably the first study to consider the composition of the whole beetle community on dung on an urban gradient
Species richness (ii) differed only for dung beetles in the early season visit; estimates of total community species richness for saprophagous species suggest that richness is genuinely lower at urban sites while predators are richest at fringe sites
Summary
Urbanisation is among the foremost threats to biodiversity, with an increasing proportion of the global human population living in cities (United Nations 2014). It is this high population density that makes urban green spaces a key point of interaction between humans and wildlife, driving the need for researching biodiversity in urban areas (Niemelä 1999). Key to this is understanding how functional traits drive community assembly.
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