Life‐history traits and landscape characteristics predict macro‐moth responses to forest fragmentation

Abstract

How best to manage forest patches, mitigate the consequences of forest fragmentation, and enable landscape permeability are key questions facing conservation scientists and managers. Many temperate forests have become increasingly fragmented, resulting in reduced interior forest habitat, increased edge habitats, and reduced connectivity. Using a citizen science landscape-scale mark-release-recapture study on 87 macro-moth species, we investigated how both life-history traits and landscape characteristics predicted macro-moth responses to forest fragmentation. Wingspan, wing shape, adult feeding, and larval feeding guild predicted macro-moth mobility, although the predictive power of wingspan and wing shape depended on the species' affinity to the forest. Solitary trees and small fragments functioned as "stepping stones," especially when their landscape connectivity was increased, by being positioned within hedgerows or within a favorable matrix. Mobile forest specialists were most affected by forest fragmentation: despite their high intrinsic dispersal capability, these species were confined mostly to the largest of the forest patches due to their strong affinity for the forest habitat, and were also heavily dependent on forest connectivity in order to cross the agricultural matrix. Forest fragments need to be larger than five hectares and to have interior forest more than 100 m from the edge in order to sustain populations of forest specialists. Our study provides new insights into the movement patterns of a functionally important insect group, with implications for the landscape-scale management of forest patches within agricultural landscapes.

The use of hedgerows as flight paths by moths in intensive farmland landscapes

“…These figures alone indicate that hedgerows may be key habitat features for macromoths within agricultural landscapes. This result supports the findings from previous studies that hedgerows are important habitat features for invertebrates within agricultural landscapes and more specifically for butterflies and moths (Maudsley 2000;Dover 1990;Merckx et al 2010b;Slade et al 2013). Other researchers have found that butterflies may be using hedgerows as wildlife corridors and these results suggest that moths are also using hedges in a similar manner nocturnally (Dover 1990).…”

“…It is likely that factors such as size, mobility and resource requirements of moth species will have an impact on the behavioural ecology of a species and therefore its response to linear landscape features. Such varied responses have already been observed with moth species to hedgerow trees (Merckx et al 2010b;Slade et al 2013). …”

“…Slade et al (2013) found that a higher number of moths were captures adjacent to hedgerow trees than isolated ones (61 vs 27 %), suggesting that the presence of trees alone are not influencing moth abundance. As suggested previously, the effect of physical structure is likely different for different moth species, and heterogeneity of hedgerows at a wider scale is important to be sure to provide suitable habitats for a wider range of species.…”

“…Mark-Release-Recapture experiments have frequently been used to analyse the dispersal of insects such as butterflies. This method has been adapted for moths, using light traps to capture and recapture moth species and study their dispersal around landscapes (Merckx et al 2009a;Merckx et al 2010a;Slade et al 2013). This method could be used to investigate moth dispersal around farm landscapes, however it requires a large amount of human resources and has a low return rate (around 5 % with regards Merckx et al 2009a;Slade et al 2013) and was therefore not chosen for this study.…”

Urban stress is associated with variation in microbial species composition—but not richness—in Manhattan

“…Based on studies of animals and plants in urban ecosystems, we expected that species richness would be lower in street medians than in city parks. Additionally, we expected the composition of microbial communities to be distinct in the two habitat types because previous studies have shown that persisting in high-stress habitats and/or maintaining viable populations in small habitat patches can be strongly influenced by speciesspecific traits (Schleicher et al, 2011;Slade et al, 2013;Concepción et al, 2015).…”