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Temporal variability of carabid beetles as a function of geography, environment, and species

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Abstract

Populations of species fluctuate through time and across geographic space. Identifying the potential drivers of temporal variability in population dynamics is a fundamental aim of population ecology, with clear implications to understanding population extinction risk, the influence of diversity on composite community scale variability, and the extent to which temporal variability is driven by exogenous (e.g., climate) or endogenous (e.g., life history) factors. We used data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) consisting of over 750 carabid beetle species systematically sampled between 2013 and 2021 across 47 terrestrial sites in the USA to examine the relative roles of geographic location, environmental gradients, and species identity on temporal variability. We find an effect of species taxonomic identity on resulting temporal variability in abundance both at site-level and taxonomy-level scales. Environmental variables (mean annual temperature and precipitation and seasonality in temperature and precipitation) and geographic position (latitude and longitude) were not strongly related to temporal variability, and there was no spatial signal in site-level mean temporal variability. The importance of species to temporal variability highlights the role of life history differences across species, resulting in a mean shift in population growth rate, as a potentially more important driver than aspects of site and environment that may relate more to temporal changes in population growth rates.

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Data availibility

R code is available on figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21217709. The NEON data should be cited directly if used, as NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network). Ground beetles sampled from pitfall traps, 2013–2021. https://doi.org/10.48443/tx5f-dy17. Dataset accessed from https://data.neonscience.org.

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Acknowledgements

The National Ecological Observatory Network is a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation and operated under a cooperative agreement by Battelle. This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation through the NEON Program. This work benefited greatly from conversations with Carl Boettiger.

Funding

This work has been performed with funding to Tad Dallas from the National Science Foundation (NSF-DEB-2017826) Macrosystems Biology and NEON-Enabled Science program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Tad A. Dallas, Cleber Ten Caten & Lauren A. Holian

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  1. Tad A. Dallas
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  2. Cleber Ten Caten
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  3. Lauren A. Holian
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Contributions

Tad Dallas performed the analysis and wrote the initial draft. Cleber Ten Caten and Lauren Holian helped form the initial idea, provided feedback on analysis, and contributed to manuscript writing and editing.

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Correspondence to Tad A. Dallas.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Dallas, T.A., Caten, C.T. & Holian, L.A. Temporal variability of carabid beetles as a function of geography, environment, and species. Theor Ecol 17, 35–43 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-023-00573-1

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