Dragonfly community re‐organisation in boreal forest lakes: rapid species turnover driven by climate change?

Abstract

Abstract. Climate change affects many ecosystems on earth. If not dying out or migrating, the species affected have to survive the altered conditions, including changes in community structure. It is, however, usually difficult to distinguish changes caused by a changing climate from other factors. Forestry is considered to be the major disturbance factor in Swedish forests. Here, we use forest lake data sets from 1996 and 2006 which include species abundance data for dragonfly larvae, water plant structure, forest age and forestry measures during a period of 25 years: from 1980 to 2005. Hence, we were able to discriminate between forestry effects and changes in species composition driven by recent climate change. We explored effects on regional species composition, species abundance and ecosystem functions, such as changes in niche use, utilising dragonflies (Odonata) as model organisms. Our results show that dragonflies react rapidly to climate change, showing strong responses over such a short time span as 10 years. We observed changes in both species composition and abundance; former rare species have become more frequent and now occur in lakes of a wider quality range, while former widespread species have become more selective in their choice of waters. The new communities harbour about the same number of species as before, but seen from a regional perspective, diversity is reduced. We predict that the altered species composition and abundance might raise new demands in conservation planning as well as altering the ecological functions of the aquatic systems.

Adult activity and temperature preference drives region-wide damselfly (Zygoptera) distributions under a warming climate

“…This pattern was evident during our surveys because the boreal (rear edge) damselflies were primarily confined to places with relatively short growing seasons. Boreal odonate community reassembly can happen on fast (decadal) time scales, meaning that even large temperate-embedded boreal ecosystems in the midlatitudes could see notable changes in their insect fauna in the coming years [26].…”

List of Odonates from the Floresta Nacional de São Francisco de Paula (FLONA - SFP), with two new distribution records for Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

“…The only species known to be widespread in South America is Libellula herculea (Garrison et al 2006). According to Carle & Kjer (2002) this genus is well diagnosed and is considered a sister group of Orthemis, however an undescribed species is known from Brazil (Garrison et al 2006). The two species belonging to the genus Libellula recorded here are: Libellula herculea and Libellula sp.…”

“…We sampled for dragonflies during the year of 2014, all the sampling sites were visited three times per year, once per season: summer (2 -11 January); autumn (10 -18 May); spring (2 -11 November); excluding the winter season due to the lack of activity of adult Odonata in the low temperatures prevailing. Our sampling efforts were concentrated on adults of Odonata, since the larvae can present great difficulties to the determination work, as only scarce information is available for this region (Garrison et al 2006). The sampling method used handhold insect nets, performed by a team of two persons, in sunny days, during the peak time of Odonata activities (between 09:00 h to 16:00 h), which is an adaptation of .…”

“…All specimens collected were immediately preserved in 96% ethanol and deposited in the MCNU, afterwards determined in the Evolution and Ecology Laboratory according to Garrison et al (2006Garrison et al ( , 2010, Heckman (2006Heckman ( , 2010, Lencioni (2006) and original species descriptions. For the systematics classification, we followed Dijkstra et al (2014).…”

Annotated checklist of the dragonflies (Insecta: Odonata) of the Kaliningrad region, North-Western Russia

“…The territory of the Kaliningrad region underwent considerable biotopical changes and human habitat disturbance over the past century. These factors, together with climate changes might be expected to affect the species composition of the dragonfly fauna and distribution ranges of dragonflies, as it was shown for some European countries (Ott, 2001(Ott, , 2010Hassall et al, 2007;Flenner & Sahlén, 2008;Bernard et al, 2009;Termaat, 2010;De Knijf et al, 2011). Thus, the Kaliningrad region remained one of the most poorly studied areas of Europe.…”