From Phenology and Habitat Preferences to Climate Change: Importance of Citizen Science in Studying Insect Ecology in the Continental Scale with American Red Flat Bark Beetle, Cucujus clavipes, as a Model Species

Radomir Jaskuła,Axel Schwerk,Marek Michalski,Marta Kolanowska

doi:10.3390/insects12040369

Abstract

Simple SummaryStudies of widely distributed species often are problematic as such research usually needs to engage a lot of time, a large team of field workers, and big financial support before good quality data will be collected. Citizen scientists allow to study different aspects of species biology and ecology with significantly reduced basic operational costs of such studies. Based on the data deposited in the iNaturalist database, we studied the ecology of the American flat bark beetle in the entire area of its species range. The results clearly show high value of citizen science, particularly in studies focused on habitat preferences and phenology in both recognized subspecies of this taxon.The American red flat bark beetle, Cucujus clavipes, is a wide distributed saproxylic species divided into two subspecies: ssp. clavipes restricted to eastern regions of North America and ssp. puniceus occurring only in western regions of this continent. Unique morphological features, including body shape and body coloration, make this species easy to recognize even for amateurs. Surprisingly, except some studies focused on physiological adaptations of the species, the ecology of C. clavipes was almost unstudied. Based on over 500 records collected by citizen scientists and deposited in the iNaturalist data base, we studied phenological activity of adult beetles, habitat preferences and impact of future climate change for both subspecies separately. The results clearly show that spp. clavipes and ssp. puniceus can be characterized by differences in phenology and macrohabitat preferences, and their ranges do not overlap at any point. Spp. clavipes is found as more opportunistic taxon occurring in different forests as well as in urban and agricultural areas with tree vegetation always in elevations below 500 m, while elevational distribution of ssp. puniceus covers areas up to 2300 m, and the beetle was observed mainly in forested areas. Moreover, we expect that climate warming will have negative influence on both subspecies with the possible loss of proper niches at level even up to 47–70% of their actual ranges during next few decades. As the species is actually recognized as unthreatened and always co-occurs with many other species, we suggest, because of its expected future habitat loss, to pay more attention to conservationists for possible negative changes in saproxylic insects and/or forest fauna in North America. In addition, as our results clearly show that both subspecies of C. clavipes differ ecologically, which strongly supports earlier significant morphological and physiological differences noted between them, we suggest that their taxonomical status should be verified by molecular data, because very probably they represent separate species.

Highlights

The citizen science is often defined as a scientific research conducted, at least in part, by nonprofessional and/or amateur scientists [1,2]
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the role of citizen science, observations done using the iNaturalist website, in studying selected aspects of insect ecology with the American red flat bark beetle, Cucujus clavipes, as a model taxon, including
Numerous records for Cucujus clavipes are known from the literature [76,77,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104] and various online resources, such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility, all data used in this study were taken directly and only from the iNaturalist data base

Summary

Introduction

The citizen science (known as “online citizen science”, “community science”, and/or “volunteer monitoring”) is often defined as a scientific research conducted, at least in part, by nonprofessional and/or amateur scientists [1,2]. In many cases citizen scientists helped, e.g., to delimit the geographical distribution of a species, e.g., [15,16]; to find species for the first time in the country, e.g., [17,18,19,20], in the continent, e.g., [21,22,23]; or even to discover new taxa, e.g., [21,24,25,26,27,28,29]. Numerous studies show that data collected by amateur scientists allow to describe new interactions between species, e.g., [17,52], to investigate animal phenology, e.g., [53], and behavior, e.g., [54], to find changes in species abundance and demography, e.g., [55,56,57], and other threats for local fauna and flora being important for nature conservation, e.g., [8,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65]

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