Dung Beetle community and functions along a habitat-disturbance gradient in the Amazon : a rapid assessment of ecological functions associated to biodiversity

Braga, Rodrigo Fagundes and Korasaki, Vanesca and Andresen, Ellen and Louzada, Julio (2013) Dung Beetle community and functions along a habitat-disturbance gradient in the Amazon : a rapid assessment of ecological functions associated to biodiversity. PLoS ONE, 8 (2): e57786. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

Although there is increasing interest in the effects of habitat disturbance on community attributes and the potential consequences for ecosystem functioning, objective approaches linking biodiversity loss to functional loss are uncommon. The objectives of this study were to implement simultaneous assessment of community attributes (richness, abundance and biomass, each calculated for total-beetle assemblages as well as small- and large-beetle assemblages) and three ecological functions of dung beetles (dung removal, soil perturbation and secondary seed dispersal), to compare the effects of habitat disturbance on both sets of response variables, and their relations. We studied dung beetle community attributes and functions in five land-use systems representing a disturbance gradient in the Brazilian Amazon: primary forest, secondary forest, agroforestry, agriculture and pasture. All response variables were affected negatively by the intensification of habitat disturbance regimes, but community attributes and ecological functions did not follow the same pattern of decline. A hierarchical partitioning analysis showed that, although all community attributes had a significant effect on the three ecological functions (except the abundance of small beetles on all three ecological functions and the biomass of small beetles on secondary dispersal of large seed mimics), species richness and abundance of large beetles were the community attributes with the highest explanatory value. Our results show the importance of measuring ecological function empirically instead of deducing it from community metrics.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
PLoS ONE
Additional Information:
Copyright: © 2013 Braga et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1100
Subjects:
?? general agricultural and biological sciencesgeneral biochemistry,genetics and molecular biologygeneral medicineagricultural and biological sciences(all)biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology(all)medicine(all) ??
ID Code:
73150
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
04 Mar 2015 09:12
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
10 Oct 2024 00:03