Agroecology and Environment, Zürich, Switzerland.
Department of Ecology and Evolution, Estación Biológica de Doñana EBD (CSIC), Seville, Spain.
J Anim Ecol. 2024 May;93(5):540-553. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.14062. Epub 2024 Mar 20.
Understanding how anthropogenic activities induce changes in the functional traits of arthropod communities is critical to assessing their ecological consequences. However, we largely lack comprehensive assessments of the long-term impact of global-change drivers on the trait composition of arthropod communities across a large number of species and sites. This knowledge gap critically hampers our ability to predict human-driven impacts on communities and ecosystems. Here, we use a dataset of 1.73 million individuals from 877 species to study how four functionally important traits of carabid beetles and spiders (i.e. body size, duration of activity period, tolerance to drought, and dispersal capacity) have changed at the community level across ~40 years in different types of land use and as a consequence of land use changes (that is, urbanisation and loss of woody vegetation) at the landscape scale in Switzerland. The results show that the mean body size in carabid communities declined in all types of land use, with particularly stronger declines in croplands compared to forests. Furthermore, the length of the activity period and the tolerance to drought of spider communities decreased in most land use types. The average body size of carabid communities in landscapes with increased urbanisation in the last ~40 years tended to decrease. However, the length of the activity period, the tolerance to drought, and the dispersal capacity did not change significantly. Furthermore, urbanisation promoted increases in the average dispersal capacities of spider communities. Additionally, urbanisation favoured spider communities with larger body sizes and longer activity periods. The loss of woody areas at the landscape level was associated with trait shifts to carabid communities with larger body sizes, shorter activity periods, higher drought tolerances and strongly decreased dispersal capacities. Decreases in activity periods and dispersal capacities were also found in spider communities. Our study demonstrates that human-induced changes in land use alter key functional traits of carabid and spider communities in the long term. The detected trait shifts in arthropod communities likely have important consequences for their functional roles in ecosystems.
了解人为活动如何改变节肢动物群落的功能特征对于评估其生态后果至关重要。然而，我们在很大程度上缺乏对全球变化驱动因素对大量物种和地点的节肢动物群落特征组成的长期影响的综合评估。这一知识差距严重限制了我们预测人类活动对群落和生态系统影响的能力。在这里，我们使用了一个包含 877 个物种的 173 万个体的数据集，研究了在瑞士不同类型的土地利用中，以及在景观尺度上由于土地利用变化（即城市化和木本植被的丧失），捕食性甲虫和蜘蛛的四个功能重要特征（即身体大小、活动期持续时间、耐旱性和扩散能力）在社区层面上是如何变化的。结果表明，在所有类型的土地利用中，捕食性甲虫群落的平均体型都在缩小，与森林相比，农田的下降幅度尤其明显。此外，蜘蛛群落的活动期长度和耐旱性也在大多数土地利用类型中下降。在过去 40 年中，景观中城市化程度增加的地区，捕食性甲虫群落的平均体型趋于减小。然而，活动期的长度、耐旱性和扩散能力并没有显著变化。此外，城市化促进了蜘蛛群落平均扩散能力的增加。此外，城市化有利于体型较大、活动期较长的蜘蛛群落。景观水平上木本区域的丧失与捕食性甲虫群落体型增大、活动期缩短、耐旱性提高和扩散能力大幅下降有关。在蜘蛛群落中也发现了活动期和扩散能力的下降。我们的研究表明，人类引起的土地利用变化会长期改变捕食性甲虫和蜘蛛群落的关键功能特征。节肢动物群落中检测到的特征变化可能对它们在生态系统中的功能角色产生重要影响。
