Where have all the beetles gone? Long‐term study reveals carabid species decline in a nature reserve in Northern Germany
By K. Homburg, C. Drees, Estève Boutaud, D. Nolte, W. Schuett, P. Zumstein, E. V. Ruschkowski, T. Assmann. Insect Conservation and Diversity, 2019
105 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The drastic insect decline has received increasing attention in scientific as well as in public media. Long‐term studies of insect diversity trends are still rare, even though such studies are highly important to assess extent, drivers and potential consequences of insect loss in ecosystems. To gain insights into carabid diversity trends of ancient and sustainably managed woodlands, we analysed data of carabid beetles from a trapping study that has been run for 24 years in an old nature reserve of Northern Germany, the Lüneburg Heath. We examined temporal changes in several diversity measures (e.g. biomass, species richness, functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity) and tested diverse species traits as predictor variables for species occurrence. In contrast to recently published long‐term studies of insect diversity, we did not observe a decline in biomass, but in species richness and phylogenetic diversity in carabids at our study site. Additionally, hibernation stage predicted the occurrence probability of carabids: Species hibernating as imagines or both imagines and larvae and breeding in spring showed strongest declines. We assume the detected trends to be the result of external effects such as climate change and the application of pesticides in the surrounding. Our results suggest that the drivers for the insect decline and the responses are multifaceted. This highlights the importance of long‐term studies with identification of the catches to, at best, species level to support the understanding of mechanisms driving changes in insect diversity and abundance.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/626e6a85a039a54e1555c3dfb5cef633d60289b2
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Citations in the corpus
- Further evidence for a global decline of the entomofauna (2020, background): “Climate change may have had a strong effect on the decline of spring‐breeding carabids, while the application of broad‐spectrum insecticides (diflubenzuron) in the surrounding areas used for extensive agriculture, e.g. grazing in the bogs, could also have had an impact (Homburg et al. 2019).”
- Declining abundance of beetles, moths and caddisflies in the Netherlands (2019, background): “Amid recent reports of broad insect decline in German nature reserves (Hallmann et al., 2017; Habel & Schmitt, 2018; Homburg et al., 2019; Schuch et al., 2019), concerns with respect to 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70”