Drivers of community assembly in tropical forest restoration sites: role of local environment, landscape, and space

Abstract

There is increasing recognition that community assembly theory can offer valuable insights for ecological restoration. We studied community assembly processes following tropical forest restoration efforts, using dung beetles (Scarabaeinae) as a focal taxon to investigate taxonomic and functional patterns of biodiversity recovery. We evaluated the relative importance of the local environment (i.e., canopy cover, understory cover, tree basal area, and soil texture), landscape context (i.e., habitat patch proximity and availability and percentage of surrounding area classified as natural forest or Eucalyptus spp. plantation), and space (i.e., spatial proximity of the study areas to estimate dispersal limitation or unmeasured spatially structured processes) on dung beetle species and functional trait composition across a gradient of 15 restoration sites in Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We also assessed which factors were the primary determinants in the establishment of individual dung beetle functional groups, classified according to size, food relocation habit, diet, and period of flight activity. Both species and functional trait composition were most strongly influenced by the local environment, indicating that assembly was predominantly driven by niche-based processes. Most of the variation explained by space was co-explained by local environment and landscape context, ruling out a strong influence of dispersal limitation and random colonization on assembly following restoration. In addition, nearly all of the variance explained by landscape context was co-explained by local environment, suggesting that arrival and establishment at a site depends on both local and landscape-scale environmental factors. Despite strong evidence for niche-based assembly, a large amount of variation remained unexplained in all models, suggesting that stochastic processes and/or unmeasured environmental variables also play an important role. The relative importance of local environment, landscape context, and space changed considerably when analyzing the assembly mechanisms of each functional group separately. Therefore, to recover distinct functional traits in restoration sites, it may be necessary to manipulate different components of the local environment and surrounding landscape. Overall, this study shows that assembly rules can help to better understand recovery processes, enabling improvement of future restoration efforts.

Assembly mechanisms of dung beetles in temperate forests and grazing pastures

“…It has been proposed that dung beetle assemblages in tropical forests are structured by their niche space (environmental filtering), while the influence of limited dispersal and random colonization are discarded 29 . This suggests that the arrival and establishment of species depends on environmental factors 29,53 , and could result in ecological redundancy in dung beetle assemblages 28, 54,55 . Also, in tropical forest the degradation and loss of natural habitats decreases the functional diversity of dung beetles 26,27,56 , which has consequences on their ecosystem functions 57 .…”

“…Moreover, a recent study based on the functional diversity of dung beetles suggests that the environment restricts species dispersion or establishment along an elevation gradient, thus a niche filtering mechanism would be structuring these communities 28 . Likewise, Audino et al 29 found that niche-based processes drove the assembly of dung beetle assemblages following active restoration, mainly by the influence of environmental filters. However, it is unlikely that a single process would be responsible of the assemblages' structure.…”

Fire? They don't give a dung! The resilience of dung beetles to fire in a tropical savanna

“…Araújo & Rahbek, 2006;Lugo, 2008;Peters et al, Correspondence: Cássio A. Nunes, Setor de Ecologia, Departamento de Biologia, Universidade Federal de Lavras, CP 3037, Câmpus Universitário -Lavras, Minas Gerais 37200-000, Brazil. Audino et al, 2017;Concepción et al, 2017;Sepp et al, 2018) are among the drivers with the strongest effects on community diversity and assembly. Dalsgaard et al, 2007;Lugo, 2008), and land-use modifications (e.g.…”

“…Dalsgaard et al, 2007;Lugo, 2008), and land-use modifications (e.g. Audino et al, 2017;Concepción et al, 2017;Sepp et al, 2018) are among the drivers with the strongest effects on community diversity and assembly. However, how biological communities respond to disturbances depends on many conditions, including biological characteristics (e.g.…”

Research and Evaluation of Geographic Information System Based on Highway Ecological Landscape

“…For more remote and inaccessible areas, usually it is difficult to conventional methods to conduct a comprehensive investigation and study, and using GIS technology, not only to the current situation to conduct a comprehensive understanding, but also the ecological status of the past, can provide expressway road ecological identification with a large number of integrated, macro, dynamic and rapidly updated information, just make up for the defects of the conventional methods for the ecological degradation of situation has a comprehensive and accurate grasp of. This has greatly promoted the development of impact assessment of highway ecological landscape [12].…”