Diversity and resource selection of dung beetles in a relictual mountain forest in Brazil
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Diversity and resource selection of dung beetles in a relictual mountain forest in Brazil Fredy Alvarado 1,2
&
Carolina N. Liberal 3 & Thais A. V. Dantas 2 & Davy B. Bérgamo 4 & Rosemberg F. Menezes 2,5
Received: 18 June 2020 / Accepted: 9 October 2020 # African Association of Insect Scientists 2020
Abstract Most of the tropical ecosystems are now altered, consequently modifying the species diversity, composition and feeding behaviours. Precisely, the survival of species is dependent on their characteristics to endure the novel environments immersed in human-dominated landscapes. Thus, comparative studies of how different community attributes and trophic guilds respond to changes in land use would be useful. In this study, we analyzed diversity, composition and food selection of dung beetles in an Atlantic forest enclave (Ombrophilous forest remnant) from North-eastern Brazil. We sampled dung beetles using 60 pitfall traps distributed in our study region. Diversity and composition were estimated by using Hill numbers (or the effective number of species) and biomass of individuals and were compared among three types of vegetation structure (forest, forest edge and open pastures) and four different types of baits (human, pig, chicken and cattle excrements). We found that diversity measures weighted by biomass allowed better detection of the variation between habitat types and food preference than weighted by the number of individuals. The dung beetle biomass indicates that the spatial dominance of open pastures promote a drastic impoverishment of dung beetle diversity and composition. We also found that β diversity shows an evidence of homogenization on the resource food selection, related with the preference in the attraction of dung beetles to exotic omnivores. Our results show that replacing forests with cattle pastures modifies diversity, species composition, and resource food selection patterns, which could affect the ecosystem provision by dung beetles. Despite our study region is immersed in a human-dominated-landscape, forest remnants continue to hold a high diversity assemblage compared with most degraded environments. Keywords Atlantic forest . Cattle pastures . Food selection . Human-dominated-landscapes . Scarabaeinae . Species composition
Introduction The expansion and intensification of agricultural activities is one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss and has modified
ecosystem function on a global scale (Allan et al. 2015). Therefore, many remaining areas of tropical forests are embedded within agricultural lands in human-dominatedlandscapes (Dallimer et al. 2012). Human-dominated-
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42690-020-00327-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Fredy Alvarado [email protected]
3
Departamento de Sistemática e Ecologia, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Cidade Universitária, Castelo Branco, João Pessoa, Paraíba 58051900, Brazil
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