Vasconcelos, Sasha
- Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Land-use intensification and climate change have strong filtering effects on arthropod communities. Intensification increases landscape homogeneity and field-scale disturbance while extreme weather events are increasing with climate change. To disentangle their impacts, we analyzed predatory arthropod abundance and diversity across microhabitats (canopy, ground) and diet breadth (specialist, generalist, omnivore) in 58 sorghum fields in Uruguay over two years. Using a trait-based framework and Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities, we found that double cropping negatively affected predator communities, reducing canopy predator abundance and ground predator species richness, especially ground omnivores. Larger fields decreased the proportion of canopy specialists in the community, and landscape homogeneity increased the proportion of ground omnivores. Extreme weather mainly affected ground predators, with species richness and abundance decreasing with high rainfall variability. The proportion of ground specialists decreased with both variable rainfall and more hot days. Omnivorous and generalist ground predators were more resilient to climatic stress and canopy predator abundance increased under heat extremes. Our findings suggest that land-use intensification exerts stronger negative effects on predator communities than extreme weather, though the latter can further reduce functional diversity. To enhance predator community resilience and support biological control, management strategies should prioritize reducing disturbances, such as double-cropping, and creating refuges within fields to protect against climatic extremes.
Keywords
Natural enemy; Diet breadth; Microhabitat; Climate change; Conservation biological control; Agriculture; Management intensification
Published in
Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment
2026, volume: 397, article number: 110100
Publisher: ELSEVIER
SLU Authors
UKÄ Subject classification
Agricultural Science
Environmental Sciences and Nature Conservation
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2025.110100
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/144960