Abstract
Protection of the world’s remaining forests and biodiversity is a matter of global concern. Yunnan, China is home to China’s only mainland tropical rainforests, and 20% of China’s total biodiversity. Despite restoration measures and establishment of new protected areas, this region is still experiencing biodiversity loss due to inadequate management and monitoring. We evaluate restoration success of China’s tropical forests in Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve (XSBN-NNR), Yunnan, China using dung beetles as an indicator taxon. We sampled across a land-use gradient of human alteration: protected forest, restored forest, community owned forest, and rubber plantation. We collected 3,748 dung beetles from 21 species over a 3 month period. Multivariate analyses revealed unique assemblages in each land-use category, but with restored forest most similar to protected areas, suggesting restoration success in this region. Community forests were more diverse than plantations, suggesting that community forests may be a valuable and practical conservation tool in this region. Most species were generalists, although some had dietary and habitat preferences. Furthermore, dietary niche breadths were, on average, higher in disturbed areas, suggesting that disturbance may result in dietary changes. We show that restoration of tropical forests appears to be successful for a key ecological and biological indicator group- dung beetles. Furthermore, community-owned forests appear to be valuable and practical method of maintaining ecosystem health and biodiversity in the region. Future management in this region would likely benefit from encouragement to maintain community-owned forests, economic incentives for restoring farmland to forest, and increased environmental monitoring across the land-use gradient.
Highlights
Protecting the world’s remaining biodiversity, in tropical regions, is a priority [1,2,3]
Our results are consistent with numerous other studies in SE Asia that show that dung beetle assemblage diversity decreases with increasing disturbance (e.g. [17,74,75,76,77])
Our results show that restoration of farmland to forest restores dung beetle communities with restored forests showing increased diversity and abundance of dung beetles compared to plantations and community forests and community compositions most similar to protected forest
Summary
Protecting the world’s remaining biodiversity, in tropical regions, is a priority [1,2,3]. Indicator taxa are increasingly used as a tool for monitoring ecosystem health and restoration success, especially in highly diverse tropical regions [11,12,13]. Yunnan Province, bordered by Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and Vietnam, contains some of China’s last remaining tropical rainforests It lies within the Indo-Chinese biodiversity hotspot [27], and is one of only two regions in China where rubber We evaluated the diversity and trophic requirements of dung beetle assemblages across protected forests, restored forest, community-owned forests, and rubber plantations and explored these trends in terms of tropical forest ecosystem health in China. We identified potential indicator species, which can be further tested and potentially used to monitor ecosystem change in the region in the future
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