TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vogel, Sebastian
A1  - Prinzing, Andreas
A1  - Bußler, Heinz
A1  - Müller, Jörg
A1  - Schmidt, Stefan
A1  - Thorn, Simon
T1  - Abundance, not diversity, of host beetle communities determines abundance and diversity of parasitoids in deadwood
JF  - Ecology and Evolution
N2  - Most parasites and parasitoids are adapted to overcome defense mechanisms of their specific hosts and hence colonize a narrow range of host species. Accordingly, an increase in host functional or phylogenetic dissimilarity is expected to increase the species diversity of parasitoids. However, the local diversity of parasitoids may be driven by the accessibility and detectability of hosts, both increasing with increasing host abundance. Yet, the relative importance of these two mechanisms remains unclear. We parallelly reared communities of saproxylic beetle as potential hosts and associated parasitoid Hymenoptera from experimentally felled trees. The dissimilarity of beetle communities was inferred from distances in seven functional traits and from their evolutionary ancestry. We tested the effect of host abundance, species richness, functional, and phylogenetic dissimilarities on the abundance, species richness, and Shannon diversity of parasitoids. Our results showed an increase of abundance, species richness, and Shannon diversity of parasitoids with increasing beetle abundance. Additionally, abundance of parasitoids increased with increasing species richness of beetles. However, functional and phylogenetic dissimilarity showed no effect on the diversity of parasitoids. Our results suggest that the local diversity of parasitoids, of ephemeral and hidden resources like saproxylic beetles, is highest when resources are abundant and thereby detectable and accessible. Hence, in some cases, resources do not need to be diverse to promote parasitoid diversity.
KW  - barcoding
KW  - deadwood
KW  - experiment
KW  - host–parasitoid interaction
KW  - natural enemy
KW  - specialization
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-238892
VL  - 11
IS  - 11
SP  - 6881
EP  - 6888
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Uhler, Johannes
A1  - Redlich, Sarah
A1  - Zhang, Jie
A1  - Hothorn, Torsten
A1  - Tobisch, Cynthia
A1  - Ewald, Jörg
A1  - Thorn, Simon
A1  - Seibold, Sebastian
A1  - Mitesser, Oliver
A1  - Morinère, Jérôme
A1  - Bozicevic, Vedran
A1  - Benjamin, Caryl S.
A1  - Englmeier, Jana
A1  - Fricke, Ute
A1  - Ganuza, Cristina
A1  - Haensel, Maria
A1  - Riebl, Rebekka
A1  - Rojas-Botero, Sandra
A1  - Rummler, Thomas
A1  - Uphus, Lars
A1  - Schmidt, Stefan
A1  - Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf
A1  - Müller, Jörg
T1  - Relationships of insect biomass and richness with land use along a climate gradient
JF  - Nature Communications
N2  - Recently reported insect declines have raised both political and social concern. Although the declines have been attributed to land use and climate change, supporting evidence suffers from low taxonomic resolution, short time series, a focus on local scales, and the collinearity of the identified drivers. In this study, we conducted a systematic assessment of insect populations in southern Germany, which showed that differences in insect biomass and richness are highly context dependent. We found the largest difference in biomass between semi-natural and urban environments (-42%), whereas differences in total richness (-29%) and the richness of threatened species (-56%) were largest from semi-natural to agricultural environments. These results point to urbanization and agriculture as major drivers of decline. We also found that richness and biomass increase monotonously with increasing temperature, independent of habitat. The contrasting patterns of insect biomass and richness question the use of these indicators as mutual surrogates. Our study provides support for the implementation of more comprehensive measures aimed at habitat restoration in order to halt insect declines.
KW  - biodiversity
KW  - ecology
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-265058
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
ER  -