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Response of saprophagous wood-boring beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) to severe habitat loss due to logging in an aspen-dominated boreal landscape

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Abstract

Logging significantly reduces the proportion of late-seral stands in managed boreal landscapes. Availability of habitat elements typical of these stand types, such as standing dead wood, decreases, and dependant species may have their abundance reduced or become locally extirpated, potentially affecting the ecosystem processes/services in which they take part. We evaluated the impact of habitat loss on saprophagous wood-boring beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) in an aspen-dominated landscape intensively logged for the past 30 years. Sixty natural snags of middle decay class were chosen along a gradient of habitat loss and disturbance age, cut down and dissected for beetle larvae. We then assessed relationships between species occurrence and percentage of residual cover and age of disturbance at spatial scales ranging from 40 to 2000 m radii. The most common species, Anthophylax attenuatus, showed no response, being abundant regardless of the intensity of habitat loss. The second most common species, Bellamira scalaris, showed a negative response, especially in sites which had been fragmented for a longer time. A third species, Trachysida mutabilis, showed an inverse trend, having a higher probability of presence where habitat loss was more severe. Our study shows that some saprophagous wood-borers do react negatively to habitat loss, but that within a relatively homogenous group the response can vary significantly between species. Saprophagous wood-borers should be considered potentially sensitive to habitat loss, and their response to fragmentation remains to be evaluated on a longer time frame.

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Acknowledgments

Dave Gervais and Maryse Marchand provided help with fieldwork and wood dissection. Laboratories of the Lake Duparquet Research and Teaching Forest field station were used for dissection. TEMBEC Inc. gracefully provided logging history data for the study region. This project benefited from different funding sources including a Discovery grant to P. Drapeau from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), a Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies (FQRNT)—Équipe grant (Drapeau and collaborators) and additional funding by the partners of the NSERC industrial chair in sustainable forest management of Univ. du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT) and Univ. du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

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  1. Centre for Forest Research, Département des Sciences biologiques, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre-ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada

    Michel Saint-Germain & Pierre Drapeau

  2. Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada

    Michel Saint-Germain & Pierre Drapeau

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  1. Michel Saint-Germain
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Correspondence to Michel Saint-Germain.

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Saint-Germain, M., Drapeau, P. Response of saprophagous wood-boring beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) to severe habitat loss due to logging in an aspen-dominated boreal landscape. Landscape Ecol 26, 573–586 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-011-9587-1

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