Occupancy pattern of a long-horned beetle in a variegated forest landscape: linkages between tree quality and forest cover across spatial scales
Context Interactions between landscape-scale processes and fine-grained habitat heterogeneity are usually invoked to explain species occupancy in fragmented landscapes. In variegated landscapes, however, organisms face continuous variation in micro-habitat features, which makes necessary to consider...
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| Published in: | Landscape ecology Vol. 32; no. 2; pp. 279 - 293 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Dordrecht
Springer Netherlands
01-02-2017
Springer Nature B.V |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Context
Interactions between landscape-scale processes and fine-grained habitat heterogeneity are usually invoked to explain species occupancy in fragmented landscapes. In variegated landscapes, however, organisms face continuous variation in micro-habitat features, which makes necessary to consider ecologically meaningful estimates of habitat quality at different spatial scales.
Objectives
We evaluated the spatial scales at which forest cover and tree quality make the greatest contribution to the occupancy of the long-horned beetle
Microplophorus magellanicus
(Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) in a variegated forest landscape.
Methods
We used averaged data of tree quality (as derived from remote sensing estimates of the decay stage of single trees) and spatially independent pheromone-baited traps to model the occurrence probability as a function of multiple cross-scale combinations between forest cover and tree quality (with scales ranging between 50 and 400 m).
Results
Model support and performance increased monotonically with the increasing scale at which tree quality was measured. Forest cover was not significant, and did not exhibit scale-specific effects on the occurrence probability of
M. magellanicus
. The interactive effect between tree quality and forest cover was stronger than the independent (additive) effects of tree quality and particularly forest cover. Significant interactions included tree quality measured at spatial scales ≥200 m, but cross-scale interactions occurred only in four of the seven best-supported models.
Conclusions
M. magellanicus
respond to the high-quality trees available in the landscape rather than to the amount of forest per se. Conservation of viable metapopulations of
M. magellanicus
should consider the quality of trees at spatial scales >200 m. |
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| Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0921-2973 1572-9761 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10980-016-0443-1 |