Climate-induced forest dieback drives compositional changes in insect communities that are more pronounced for rare species.

ABSTRACT: Species richness, abundance and biomass of insects have recently undergone marked declines in Europe. We metabarcoded 211 Malaise-trap samples to investigate whether drought-induced forest dieback and subsequent salvage logging had an impact on ca. 3000 species of flying insects in silver fir Pyrenean forests. While forest dieback had no measurable impact on species richness, there were significant changes in community composition that were consistent with those observed during natural forest succession. Importantly, most observed changes were driven by rare species. Variation was explained primarily by canopy openness at the local scale, and the tree-related microhabitat diversity and deadwood amount at landscape scales. The levels of salvage logging in our study did not explain compositi

SUBMITTER: Sire L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8766456 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature