Arthropod decline in grasslands and forests is associated with landscape-level drivers

By S. Seibold, M. Gossner, N. Simons, N. Blüthgen, Jörg C Müller, Didem Ambarlı, Christian Ammer, Jürgen Bauhus, M. Fischer, J. Habel and 9 more. Nature, 2019

1,054 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent reports of local extinctions of arthropod species1, and of massive declines in arthropod biomass2, point to land-use intensification as a major driver of decreasing biodiversity. However, to our knowledge, there are no multisite time series of arthropod occurrences across gradients of land-use intensity with which to confirm causal relationships. Moreover, it remains unclear which land-use types and arthropod groups are affected, and whether the observed declines in biomass and diversity are linked to one another. Here we analyse data from more than 1 million individual arthropods (about 2,700 species), from standardized inventories taken between 2008 and 2017 at 150 grassland and 140 forest sites in 3 regions of Germany. Overall gamma diversity in grasslands and forests decreased over time, indicating loss of species across sites and regions. In annually sampled grasslands, biomass, abundance and number of species declined by 67%, 78% and 34%, respectively. The decline was consistent across trophic levels and mainly affected rare species; its magnitude was independent of local land-use intensity. However, sites embedded in landscapes with a higher cover of agricultural land showed a stronger temporal decline. In 30 forest sites with annual inventories, biomass and species number—but not abundance—decreased by 41% and 36%, respectively. This was supported by analyses of all forest sites sampled in three-year intervals. The decline affected rare and abundant species, and trends differed across trophic levels. Our results show that there are widespread declines in arthropod biomass, abundance and the number of species across trophic levels. Arthropod declines in forests demonstrate that loss is not restricted to open habitats. Our results suggest that major drivers of arthropod decline act at larger spatial scales, and are (at least for grasslands) associated with agriculture at the landscape level. This implies that policies need to address the landscape scale to mitigate the negative effects of land-use practices. Analyses of a dataset of arthropod biomass, abundance and diversity in grassland and forest habitats in Germany for the period 2008–2017 reveal that drivers of arthropod declines act at the landscape level.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d675b34c994af6bb3885197d6c395ffddfd9fbff

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Citations in the corpus

Further evidence for a global decline of the entomofauna (2020, background): “The observed declines are part of a long‐term trend that had begun at least in the early 1990s (Seibold et al. 2019).”
Opportunities to enhance pollinator biodiversity in solar parks (2021, background): “These agricultural-linked drivers act at both the local and landscape scale [30], but climate change is posing growing challenges for pollinators at the global scale [31] and pathogens, alien species and environmental pollution also pose threats [19].”
Towards a U.S. national program for monitoring native bees (2020, background): “Several recent studies have documented widespread insect declines (Hallmann et al., 2017; Seibold et al., 2019; van Klink et al., 2020),”
Cascading extinctions as a hidden driver of insect decline (2020, background): “Many studies report a substantial decline in insect abundance and biomass with negative trends for many populations across the world (Hallmann et al., 2017; Seibold et al., 2019; Wagner, 2020), therefore, we can indeed expect this decline to be a major driver for secondary extinctions.”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “Much remains to be learnt about the scope for insect populations to adapt to changing abiotic conditions and biotic interactions (Hill et al., 2011; Diamond, 2018), or to cope with these changes via phenotypic plasticity (Sgrò et al., 2016).”