Spatiotemporal patterns of β-diversity of flower chafer beetles in urban park and natural reserve sites in Brazilian Cerrado

Abstract

Understanding the drivers underlying spatial and temporal changes of species distribution is a major and urgent challenge, given the scenario of increased climate and land use changes. The creation and maintenance of urban parks is an efficient conservation strategy in urbanized landscapes. In this study, we explore how spatiotemporal β-diversity components of turnover and nestedness of flower chafer beetles are influenced by climate conditions in urban park and natural reserve sites in Brazilian Cerrado, one of the largest, richest and possibly the most threatened tropical savannah on the Planet. We sampled flower chafer beetles using aerial fruit-baited traps, every 2 weeks from January to December 2014, in six ‘natural reserve’ sites (outside the urban matrix) and four ‘urban park’ sites (within the urban matrix) in Brazilian Cerrado. Our results highlighted four main findings: (i) spatially, ‘natural reserve’ and ‘urban park’ sites presented similar values of dissimilarity and substitution of flower chafer beetles but ‘urban park’ sites had higher nestedness values than ‘natural reserve’ sites; (ii) temporally, ‘natural reserve’ and ‘urban park’ sites presented similar values of dissimilarity, turnover, and nestedness; (iii) average β-diversity, turnover and nestedness values did not differ between dry and rainy seasons in both ‘natural reserve’ and ‘urban park’ sites; and (iv) none of the climatic variables influenced the temporal variation in β-diversity and its components of flower chafer beetles. Therefore, most of spatiotemporal changes in β-diversity patterns of flower chafer beetles are not related to urbanization effects or changes in climatic variables in Brazilian Cerrado. This group of insects seems to respond more to environmental and climatic filters with changes in richness, abundance, and species composition than changes in β-diversity patterns.