Arthropod biomass increase in spring correlates with NDVI in grassland habitat
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Arthropod biomass increase in spring correlates with NDVI in grassland habitat Mario Fernández-Tizón 1,2
&
Tamara Emmenegger 1 & Jörg Perner 3 & Steffen Hahn 1
Received: 30 April 2020 / Revised: 7 September 2020 / Accepted: 14 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Data from remote sensing are often used as proxies to quantify biological processes, especially at large geographical scales. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is the most frequently used proxy for primary productivity. Assuming a direct, positive interrelation between primary and secondary production in terrestrial habitats, NDVI is often used to predict food availability for higher trophic levels. However, the relationship between NDVI and arthropod biomass has rarely been tested. In this study, we analyzed extensive datasets of arthropod communities from semi-natural grasslands in central Europe to test the relationship between arthropod biomass of consumer trophic levels (“herbivores,” “mixed,” and “carnivores”) in grassland communities and NDVI during the spring season. We found that arthropod biomass generally increased with NDVI. The same positive relationship between biomass and NDVI was observed for each individual trophic level. Cross-correlation analyses did not show statistically significant lags between the NDVI and biomass of herbivores and carnivores. All in all, our study provides correlational evidence for the positive relation of primary and secondary productivity in temperate terrestrial habitats during spring. Moreover, it supports the applicability of NDVI data as a suitable habitat-specific proxy for the food availability of insectivores during spring. Keywords Primary productivity . Secondary productivity . Proxy . Food abundance . Insects . Remote sensing
Introduction The availability of nutritional resources can critically influence community composition and species richness (Mittelbach et al. 2001; Ribas et al. 2003). Animals in seasonal habitats must deal with temporal variation in resource availabilities caused by periodic changes in vegetation structure (Stinson and Brown 1983) and habitat quality (Wiegand et al. 2008). However, estimating resource availability is often Communicated by: Matthias Waltert Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-020-01698-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Mario Fernández-Tizón [email protected] 1
Department of Bird Migration, Swiss Ornithological Institute, CH 6204 Sempach, Switzerland
2
Department of Biology, Geology, Physics and Inorganic Chemistry, University Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles, Spain
3
U.A.S. Umwelt- und Agrarstudien GmbH, 07743 Jena, Germany
difficult to achieve, especially when large and/or remote areas should be sampled. Thus, ecologists frequently use proxies derived from remotely sensed data (Pettorelli et al. 2011; Stephens et al. 2015). Their application requires knowledge about
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