Beaver creates early successional hotspots for water beetles

作     者：Nummi, Petri Liao, Wenfei van der Schoor, Juliette Loehr, John 

作者机构：Univ Helsinki Dept Forest Sci POB 27 Helsinki 00014 Finland Univ Helsinki Fac Biol & Environm Sci POB 65 Helsinki 00014 Finland HAS Univ Appl Sci Dept Appl Biol Onderwijsboulevard 221 NL-5223 DE Shertogenbosch Netherlands Univ Helsinki Lammi Biol Stn Paajarventie 320 Lammi 16900 Finland 

出 版 物：《BIODIVERSITY AND CONSERVATION》 (生物物种与保护)

年 卷 期：2021年第30卷第10期

页      面：2655-2670页

核心收录：

学科分类：0710[理学-生物学] 0830[工学-环境科学与工程（可授工学、理学、农学学位）] 07[理学] 09[农学] 0713[理学-生态学] 

基　　金：University of Helsinki Helsinki University Central Hospital 

主　　题：Aquatic insect Biodiversity Conservation Dytiscidae Facilitation Landscape heterogeneity 

摘      要：Beavers (Castor spp.) are ecosystem engineers that induce local disturbance and ecological succession, which turns terrestrial into aquatic ecosystems and creates habitat heterogeneity in a landscape. Beavers have been proposed as a tool for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration. So far, most research has compared biodiversity in beaver wetlands and non-beaver wetlands, but few studies have explored how beaver-created succession affects specific taxa. In this study, we investigated how water beetles responded to different successional stages of wetlands in a beaver-disturbed landscape at Evo in southern Finland. We sampled water beetles with 1-L activity traps in 20 ponds, including: 5 new beaver ponds, 5 old beaver ponds, 5 former beaver ponds, and 5 never engineered ponds. We found that beaver wetlands had higher species richness and abundance than non-beaver wetlands, and that new beaver wetlands could support higher species richness (321%) and abundance (671%) of water beetles compared to old beaver wetlands. We think that higher water beetle diversity in new beaver ponds has resulted from habitat amelioration (available lentic water, shallow shores, aquatic vegetation, and low fish abundance) and food source enhancement (an increase of both dead and live prey) created by beaver dams and floods. We conclude that using beavers as a tool, or imitating their way of flooding, can be beneficial in wetland restoration if beaver population densities are monitored to ensure the availability of newly colonizable sites.