Abstract
Context
Many forest ecosystems around the world are facing increasing drought-induced dieback, causing mortality patches across the landscape at multiple scales. This increases the supply of biological legacies and differentially affects forest insect communities.
Objectives
We analysed the relative effects of local- and landscape-level dieback on local saproxylic beetle assemblages. We assessed how classical concepts in spatial ecology (e.g., habitat-amount and habitat-patch hypotheses) are involved in relationships between multi-scale spatial patterns of available resources and local communities.
Methods
We sampled saproxylic beetle assemblages in commercial fir forests in the French highlands. Through automatic aerial mapping, we used percentage of dead tree crown pixels to assess dieback levels at several nested spatial scales. We analysed beetle taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity related to differing levels of multi-scale dieback.
Results
We found that taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of saproxylic beetle assemblages significantly benefitted from forest dieback, at both local and landscape scales. We detected significant effects in the multiplicative models combining local and landscape variables only for phylogenetic diversity. Increased landscape-scale dieback also caused a functional specialisation of beetle assemblages, favouring those related to large and well-decayed deadwood.
Conclusions
Increasing tree mortality under benign neglect provides conservation benefits by heterogenising the forest landscape and enhancing deadwood habitats. Legacy retention practices could take advantage of unharvested, declining forest stands to promote species richness and functional diversity within conventionally managed forest landscapes.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) repository, https://doi.org/10.5063/F18W3BR1. Phylogenetic data are available in https://doi.org/10.5883/DS-PHYLOCOL.
Code availability
Not applicable.
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Acknowledgements
First of all, we thank the two reviewers for their valuable contributions to this work. This research is part of the CLIMTREE project, “Ecological and Socioeconomic Impacts of Climate-Induced Tree Dieback in Highland Forests”, within the Belmont Forum call: “Mountains as Sentinels of Change” and was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) (ANR-15-MASC-002-01). We are very grateful to Aurélien Sallé for proofreading the manuscript. We are thankful to Benoît Nusillard from INRAE EFNO; Wilfried Heintz, Laurent Burnel, Jérôme Molina and Jérôme Willm from INRAE DYNAFOR; and Grégory Sajdak from CRPF Occitanie for their field work. We also thank Thierry Noblecourt, Fabien Soldati and Thomas Barnouin from the National Centre for Forest Entomology of the ONF; Olivier Rose from the ONF; and Yves Gomy, Olivier Courtin, Benedikt Feldmann and Gianfranco Liberti for their help with species identification. We also thank all of those who helped us in the field: Dominique Micaux, Pierre Caillieux, Vincent Gherra, X. Fraces, Serge Alric, Xavier de Muyser, Francis Dueso, Serge Rumeau, Jean-Marie Quilès, Gilles Vergèz and David Veneau from the ONF; Jérôme Moret, Emmanuel Rouyer, Benoît Lecomte and Jean-Christophe Chabalier from the CRPF Occitanie; forest private owners Jean-Claude Marquis, Gilles Lefrançois, Marc Mesplié, Patrick Ferran, Jean-Baptiste Régné and Gilles Verdier (replacing J.L. Chaire for Hèches); and Denis Sabadie and Vincent Sabadie on the Sault Plateau. We thank Vicki Moore for proofreading the English manuscript.
Funding
This research is part of the project CLIMTREE “Ecological and Socioeconomic Impacts of Climate-Induced Tree Dieback in Highland Forests” within the Belmont Forum call for collaborative research actions: “Mountains as Sentinels of Change”, and was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) (ANR-15-MASC-002-01).
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JC: conceptualisation, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, visualisation, writing—original draft; LS: formal analysis, methodology, writing—reviewing & editing; SL: methodology, writing—reviewing & editing; HM: methodology, writing—reviewing & editing; GP: data curation, writing—reviewing & editing; LL: conceptualisation, data curation, writing—reviewing & editing; CM: data curation; CL-V: conceptualisation, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision, writing—reviewing & editing; CB: conceptualisation, data curation, investigation, methodology, supervision, writing—original draft, writing—reviewing & editing.
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Cours, J., Sire, L., Ladet, S. et al. Drought-induced forest dieback increases taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of saproxylic beetles at both local and landscape scales. Landsc Ecol 37, 2025–2043 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01453-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01453-5