Landscape simplification filters species traits and drives biotic homogenization

Diverse landscapes promote functional diversity of insects and spiders. Small and diverse landscape structures have become rare in today’s landscapes due to the ongoing land-use intensification. However, they are of special importance for diverse species communities, because they compensate the negative effects of intensive grassland management. This result was found by our research group in a collaboration with agroecologists from the university Göttingen and three other universities. The impact of landscape composition and local land-use intensity on the functional composition of grassland arthropods was assessed within the DFG-project “Biodiversity Exploratories”. Both spider, true bug and leafhopper species which were sampled by our group and beetles, flies, butterflies and hymenoptera species were considered. One interesting result was, that the positive effects of small-scale landscapes structures was consistently found in all arthropod groups. Even on intensively used grasslands, functionally diverse communities with many small, specialized species with low dispersal ability could be found if those were located in a heterogeneous landscape.     «

Diverse landscapes promote functional diversity of insects and spiders. Small and diverse landscape structures have become rare in today’s landscapes due to the ongoing land-use intensification. However, they are of special importance for diverse species communities, because they compensate the negative effects of intensive grassland management. This result was found by our research group in a collaboration with agroecologists from the university Göttingen and three other universities. The impac...     »