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Threshold and weighted-distance methods: a combined multiscale approach improves explanatory power of forest carabid beetle abundance in agricultural landscape

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Abstract

Context

To analyze the scales at which landscape structure influences ecological processes, two approaches with different underlying ecological assumptions exist; the usual threshold method and the weighted-distance method.

Objectives

We used abundance of species to test if the combination of weighted-distance and threshold approaches improves the explained variance of landscape metrics.

Methods

We developed a workflow using the two approaches to calculate metrics computed at multiple scales. The latter was developed using weighted metrics based on different weighted-distance functions, and one metric could be selected for more than one spatial scale. Then, we tested the explained variance of species distribution (the activity-density of Abax parallelepipedus) by these two approaches applied independently and then together in modeling a specific ecological response.

Results

The combination of metrics computed at multiple scales calculated by both weighted-distance and threshold method improved the predictive performance of the models. More precisely, adding metrics derived from the weighted-distance method to the threshold method significantly increased the explained variance when using the same environmental variables. The mean R2 values of the selected model for the threshold method was 0.34 ± 0.10, 0.49 ± 0.11 with the weighted-distance method, and reached 0.71 ± 0.07 with the two methods combined. These results demonstrate the importance of combining metrics using the weighted-distance method and the threshold method. In addition, activity-density was better explained by metrics selected at multiple scales.

Conclusions

This study highlights the importance of combining threshold and weighted-distance method at several scales to improve the explanation of ecological responses based on species abundance.

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Acknowledgements

This study has been supported by the Woodnet project, funded through the 2015–2016 BiodivERsA COFUND call for research proposals, with the national funders ANR (Agence National de la Recherche, France), MINECO (Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital, Spain) and BELSPO (Politique scientifique fédérale, Belgium). We were very grateful to Valentin Yamani and Alexane Broussin who kindly collected carabid species. We also thank the farmers for allowing us to sample their hedgerows. We thank LETG-Rennes UMR 6554 CNRS for providing land cover data of the Zone Atelier Armorique (ZAAr). We thank the French LTER (Long Term Ecologial Research) ZAAr for facilitating all research in this area. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, which contributed greatly to the improvement of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ Rennes, CNRS, ECOBIO - UMR 6553, 35042, Rennes, France

    Benjamin Bergerot, Pierre-Gilles Lemasle, Olivier Jambon, Romain Georges & Françoise Burel

  2. INRAe, UMR BAGAP, 35042, Rennes, France

    Hugues Boussard & Jacques Baudry

  3. Forêts et Sociétés, CIRAD, Univ Montpellier, 34398, Montpellier, France

    Julie Betbeder

  4. Ecosystems Modelling Unity, Forests, Biodiversity and Climate Change Program, Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), Turrialba, Cartago, Costa Rica

    Julie Betbeder

  5. CNRS, Université Rennes 2, UMR 6554 LETG, 35043, Rennes, France

    Solène Croci

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  1. Benjamin Bergerot
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Bergerot, B., Lemasle, PG., Boussard, H. et al. Threshold and weighted-distance methods: a combined multiscale approach improves explanatory power of forest carabid beetle abundance in agricultural landscape. Landsc Ecol 37, 159–174 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01338-z

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