Specialists in ancient trees are more affected by climate than generalists.

ABSTRACT: Ancient trees are considered one of the most important habitats for biodiversity in Europe and North America. They support exceptional numbers of specialized species, including a range of rare and endangered wood-living insects. In this study, we use a dataset of 105 sites spanning a climatic gradient along the oak range of Norway and Sweden to investigate the importance of temperature and precipitation on beetle species richness in ancient, hollow oak trees. We expected that increased summer temperature would positively influence all wood-living beetle species whereas precipitation would be less important with a negligible or negative impact. Surprisingly, only oak-specialist beetles with a northern distribution increased in species richness with temperature. Few specialist beetles and no

SUBMITTER: Gough LA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4813105 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature