Sheep herding in small grasslands promotes dung beetle diversity in a mountain forest landscape
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Sheep herding in small grasslands promotes dung beetle diversity in a mountain forest landscape C. Lucero Ríos‑Díaz1 · Claudia E. Moreno1 · Ilse J. Ortega‑Martínez1 · Iriana Zuria1 · Federico Escobar2 · Ignacio Castellanos1 Received: 21 October 2019 / Accepted: 4 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract It is assumed that the transformation of native forest into agricultural fields and grazing grasslands negatively affects biological diversity, and there are multiple cases documenting this pattern. For example, when lowland tropical forests are transformed into extensive cattle pastures, dung beetle richness, abundance and diversity decrease. However, in some cases, biodiversity may respond in the opposite direction. We describe dung beetle assemblages in a mountainous landscape where small grasslands (less than 7.5 ha) with sheep pastoralism are imbedded in a pine-oak forest matrix at the Mexican Transition Zone. We captured 14 species (1058 beetles) in 10 forest sites, and 20 species (2591 beetles) in 10 grassland sites. Generalized linear mixed models showed significantly higher values of species richness, diversity and abundance in grazing grasslands. We found 10 shared beetle species between forests and grassland sites, and a PERMANOVA revealed significant differences in species composition between habitats. Generalized linear models showed that dung beetle richness, abundance and diversity are related to dung availability, soil moisture and altitude, but not to soil hardness nor land use heterogeneity. Similarly, we did not find significant correlations between compositional dissimilarity (beta diversity) and dung availability nor land use heterogeneity. Our results document how traditional sheep herding in small grassland patches embedded in a forest matrix promotes the diversity of dung beetle assemblages, showing that biodiversity can be enhanced by human activities. Implications for insect conservation The results of this study indicate that grassland patches embedded in the forest matrix where traditional small herds of sheep graze, contribute to increasing landscape complexity by providing a mosaic of environmental conditions that promote a high diversity of dung beetles on a regional scale. Keywords Livestock production · Mexican Transition Zone · Pastoralism · Pine-oak forest · Scarabaeidae · Sheep pasture
Introduction The accelerated expansion of human-dominated landscapes is a conspicuous characteristic of the Anthropocene (Corlett 2015; Malhi 2017), and the main cause of landscape transformation is land use and cover change, e.g. the conversion Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-020-00277-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * C. Lucero Ríos‑Díaz [email protected] 1
Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas, Instituto de Ciencias Básicas e Ingeniería, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, Carretera Pachuca‑Tulancingo km 4.5, Mineral de la Ref
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