Abstract
Land use intensification in forests is a main driver of global biodiversity loss. Although historical state of land use differs between subtropical and temperate zones, gradients of land-use intensities similarly range from unmanaged to very intensively managed forests. Irrespective of similar land use forces in both climate zones, comparative studies on land use effects are still rare. Such studies are, however, promising in discovering more general impacts and geographical specifics of land use intensification. We studied litter-dwelling invertebrates along a gradient of increasing land use intensity in subtropical forests in Southern Brazil and temperate forests in Central Europe using similar sampling designs. Effects of land use intensity on the entire community were analyzed on the level of orders and feeding guilds. In both climate zones a similar number of individuals were caught when standardizes to 100 pitfall trap days, but taxa richness was higher in the subtropics. Moreover, community composition differed between both climate zones. In both regions, land use intensity did not affect taxa richness, but invertebrate abundance was affected in opposite ways; while increasing land use intensity resulted in a decrease of invertebrate abundance in the subtropics, an increase was observed in the temperate zone and this was mostly consistent regarding different feeding guilds. Management practices should take into account that the effect of land use intensity on biodiversity can differ drastically among climatic regions.
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Acknowledgments
The work has been funded by DFG Priority Program 1374 “Infrastructure-Biodiversity-Exploratories” (WE 2618/9-1), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq: 479223/2006–8), and Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS). This collaboration was made possible by a joint grant (Probral) from the German Academic Exchange Service and the Brazilian Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior. Field work permits were given by the responsible state environmental offices of Thuringia (according to § 72 BbgNatSchG) and IBAMA. We thank Dominik Hessenmöller, Ernst-Detlef Schulze for providing forest inventory data; Sonja Gockel, Gabriele Zimmer, Carlos Guilherme Becker, Tomás Fleck, Claudia Seilwinder, Matthias Groß, Norbert Leber for logistic and technical support; Diober Borges Lucas and Ricardo Thormman Scherer for invertebrate identification; Markus Fischer, Elisabeth Kalko, Karl-Eduard Linsenmair, and Ernst-Detlef Schulze for setting up the biodiversity exploratory project.
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Lange, M., Weisser, W.W., Gossner, M.M. et al. The impact of forest management on litter-dwelling invertebrates: a subtropical–temperate contrast. Biodivers Conserv 20, 2133–2147 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-011-0078-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-011-0078-0