Species co-occurrence networks of ground beetles in managed grasslands
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Species co‑occurrence networks of ground beetles in managed grasslands Merja Elo1 · Tarmo Ketola1 · Atte Komonen1 Received: 15 September 2020 / Accepted: 18 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Grassland biodiversity, including traditional rural biotopes maintained by traditional agricultural practices, has become threatened worldwide. Road verges have been suggested to be complementary or compensatory habitats for species inhabiting grasslands. Species co-occurrence patterns linked with species traits can be used to separate between the different mechanisms (stochasticity, environmental filtering, biotic interactions) behind community structure. Here, we study species cooccurrence networks and underlying mechanisms of ground beetle species (Carabidae) in three different managed grassland types (meadows, pastures, road verges, n = 12 in each type) in Central Finland. We aimed to find out whether road verges can be considered as compensatory to traditional rural biotopes (meadows and pastures). We found that stochasticity explained over 90% of the pairwise co-occurrences, and the non-random co-occurrences were best explained by environmental filtering, regardless of the grassland type. However, the identities and traits of the species showing non-random co-occurrences differed among the habitat types. Thus, environmental factors behind environmental filtering differ among the habitat types and are related to the site-specific characteristics and variation therein. This poses challenges to habitat management since the species’ response to management action may depend on the site-specific characteristics. Although road verges are not fully compensatory to meadows and pastures, the high similarity of species richness and the high level of shared species suggest that for carabids road verges may be corridors connecting the sparse network of the remaining traditional rural biotopes. Keywords Biodiversity · Carabidae · Environmental filtering · Joint species distribution models · Species traits
Background Understanding processes structuring communities has been a longstanding core topic in ecology, and it is crucial to applied research such as conservation biology and habitat management. At ecological time scales, communities may be structured by drift, dispersal and selection resulting from environmental or biotic factors (Vellend 2010). While it is increasingly accepted that all these processes affect community structure (Ricklefs 1987; Cottenie 2005; Chase and Myers 2011), relative contributions of the processes may Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42974-020-00034-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Merja Elo [email protected] 1
Department of Biological and Environmental Science, School of Resource Wisdom, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, Jyväskylä 40014, Finland
vary across habitat types and spatial scales (Cottenie 2005). This has resulted in a wide interest in separa
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