Traits of butterfly communities change from specialist to generalist characteristics with increasing land-use intensity

By C. Börschig, Alexandra-Maria Klein, H. Wehrden, Jochen Krauss. 2013

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Land-use intensification leads to species loss and shifts in community composition, but only few studies examine how these dynamics affect ecological and life-history traits. We thus investigated whether ecological and life-history traits differ between butterfly communities of grasslands with different land-use intensity. We conducted butterfly transect surveys in 137 grassland sites in three regions of Germany and compiled 10 species-specific ecological and life-history traits from the literature. These traits are associated with food plant specialisation, dispersal, distribution, reproduction and development. We calculated a land-use intensity gradient based on the amount of fertilise mowing frequency and grazing intensity. We analysed differences of traits characteristics between butterfly communities along the land-use intensity gradient in a fourth-corner analysis, thus considering correlations between traits. Six ecological and life-history traits changed from characteristics associated with specialists to such associated with generalists with increasing land-use intensity. These traits characteristics in intensified grasslands were: high dispersal propensity, large distribution range, low population density, more than one generation per year, hibernation in a more advanced developmental stage and a long flight period. The functional homogenisation of the butterfly communities with changes from specialist to generalist trait characteristics with increasing land-use intensity may have severe consequences for ecosystem functioning and services.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc4a12537b7883c491478877fa5c94a75399095f

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

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Citations in the corpus

Configurational landscape heterogeneity shapes functional community composition of grassland butterflies (2015, methodology): “More details about the butterfly surveys are reported in B€ orschig et al. (2013). Shannon diversity index for butterfly species (H’) was calculated as a measurement of taxonomic diversity within each EP.”
Diversity and trait composition of moths respond to land-use intensification in grasslands: generalists replace specialists (2017, background): “For example, the niche breadth of adult butterflies has been found to increase with the degree of disturbance; mono- and oligophagous specialist species occur more commonly in less disturbed habitats (Börschig et al. 2013; Kitahara et al. 2000).”
Grassland management intensification weakens the associations among the diversities of multiple plant and animal taxa (2015, background): “…intensity in agro-ecosystems (Filippi-Codaccioni et al. 2010, Allan et al. 2014), that butterﬂy communities contain fewer specialist species at high land-use intensity (Bo¨rschig et al. 2013), and that specialist pollinators become less abundant at high land-use intensity (Weiner et al. 2014).”