Abstract
Wetlands and especially floodplain forests belong to the most endangered ecosystems in Europe, characterized by complex dynamics of flood and dry periods and providing specific irreplaceable habitats for many organisms, including bioindicators. Many rove beetle species, for instance, are well-known detectors in monitoring ecological change, however, their use in environmental assessment requires to expand the insufficient knowledge on ecological environmental particularities of their assemblages. Therefore, we compared the rove beetle communities in eight habitats of floodplain forests from 2015 to 2016. Staphylinids were sampled by pitfall trapping. We compared the rove beetle taxocoenoses in the floodplain forests and their ecotones alongside three rivers (Danube, Tisa and Begej). We evaluated the impact of plant diversity and cover of vegetation layers, area, circumference and age of forest stands, distance to the forest edge, thickness of the litter layer, physical and chemical properties of soil and leaf litter (conductivity, pH, P, N, H, C) and anthropogenic impact on structure of rove beetle communities. We recorded significant interactions between total dynamic activity of rove beetles and number of plant species in shrub vegetation layer. Species richness was significantly positively correlated with number of plant species in shrub vegetation layer and soil pH, and negatively with relative H content of soil. We did not find any significant correlation between Shannon diversity, but evenness was negatively linked with species richness of plant communities in shrub layer.
Highlights
The alluvial landscape is characterized by a diverse composition of habitats
The largest number of individuals refers to the study site S1 (265 ind.) and site S5 (252 ind.), the highest species richness appeared at S5 (40 species) and S3 (39 species)
We found out that the total dynamic activity of weevils showed a significant positive relationship with number of plant species in shrub vegetation layer, while the species richness of weevils was significantly positively related to the number of plant species in herb and negatively to stand canopy of tree vegetation layers (Litavský et al 2021b)
Summary
The alluvial landscape is characterized by a diverse composition of habitats. Its structure consists of a mosaic of wetlands, waterways, oxbow lakes, meadows and various types of floodplain forests. Floodplain forests are undisputedly dynamic complexes with a high degree of biodiversity (Hughes 2007) For this reason, they are considered as priority biotopes in nature conservation. Rove beetles are an important component of the terrestrial arthropod communities of wetlands Species adapted to this dynamic habitat are highly specialized and stenotopic. This predestines them to be useful indicators with high susceptibility to natural changes or anthropogenic impact (Schatz 2007). Because of their worldwide distribution, their ecological significance, and their ecomorphological and behavioural diversity, rove beetles are nowadays becoming an increasingly investigated insect group in the fields of ecology and evolution (Betz et al 2018)
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