SLAM Project - Long Term Ecological Study of the Impacts of Climate Change in the Natural Forest of Azores: II - A survey of exotic arthropods in disturbed forest habitats

Abstract

The data we present consist of an inventory of exotic arthropods, potentially invasive, collected in exotic and mixed forests and disturbed native forest patches of the Azores Archipelago. The study was carried out between 2019 and 2020 in four islands: Corvo, Flores, Terceira and Santa Maria, where a total of 45 passive flight interception SLAM traps were deployed, during three to six consecutive months. This manuscript is the second contribution of the “SLAM Project - Long Term Ecological Study of the Impacts of Climate Change in the Natural Forest of Azores”. We provide an inventory of terrestrial arthropods belonging to Arachnida, Diplopoda, Chilopoda and Insecta classes from four Azorean islands. We identified a total of 21,175 specimens, belonging to 20 orders, 93 families and 249 species of arthropods. A total of 125 species are considered introduced, 89 native non-endemic and 35 endemic. We registered 34 new records (nine for Corvo, three for Flores, six for Terceira and 16 for Santa Maria), of which five are new for Azores, being all exotic possibly recently introduced: Dieckmanniellus nitidulus (Gyllenhal, 1838), Gronops fasciatus Küster, 1851, Hadroplontus trimaculatus (Fabricius, 1775), Hypurus bertrandi (Perris, 1852) (all Coleoptera, Curculionidae) and Cardiocondyla mauritanica Forel, 1890 (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). This publication highlights the importance of planted forests and disturbed native forest patches as reservoirs of potentially invasive arthropods and refuges for some rare relict endemic arthropod species.

SLAM Project - Long Term Ecological Study of the Impacts of Climate Change in the Natural Forest of Azores: III - Testing the impact of edge effects in a native forest of Terceira Island

“…species composition, distribution of abundance) of the sampled communities. In two previous data papers, the project was described in detail and spider data were provided for several plots in Terceira and Pico Islands ( Costa and Borges 2021 ) and the occurrence of exotic and endemic arthropods in exotic and mixed forests and small disturbed remnants of native forests was also investigated ( Borges et al 2022 ).…”

“…Some studies revealed a higher species richness and abundance of arthropods in the forest edges, which could have implications on the re-colonisation of adjacent altered habitats (Jokimäki et al 1998, Magura 2002. Studies about Azorean arthropods have shown that the endemic species are mainly restricted to native forests and introduced species are more frequently detected in anthropogenic habitats, given their higher adaptability to the conditions of the newly-created habitat (Cardoso et al 2009, Florencio et al 2015. The impact of invasive plants species is the major threat to endemic and native species in the native forest areas (Borges et al 2019b) and their deleterious effects are probably more severe at the edges of the forests patches (Borges et al 2006).…”

“…The project was described in detail in Costa and Borges (2021) as a data-paper, but the first outputs were published earlier to test several ecological questions (see Borges et al 2017 , Matthews et al 2018 , Borges et al 2020 , de Vries et al 2021 ). More recentlly, another data-paper was published investigating the occurrence of exotic and endemic arthropods in exotic and mixed forests and small disturbed remnants of native forests ( Borges et al 2022 ).…”

New records of rove-beetles (Insecta, Coleoptera, Staphylinidae) for Azores Islands (Portugal)

“…More recently, Borges et al (2022c) published an updated inventory of Staphylinidae of Azores, by collecting more than 10,000 records and identifying a total of 69 species (which represented 51% of the Staphylinidae known for the Archipelago), recording seven new Staphylinidae species for Azores and 66 new island records. In addition, recently two studies were published about Azorean arthropods including Staphylinidae : (1) Borges et al (2021) provided an inventory of arthropods collected in several Azorean agro-ecosystems, namely citrus orchards, maize fields and vineyards; and (2) Borges et al (2022e) published and inventory of Azorean arthropods, collected from different habitats types, such as exotic, mixed and native forest patches in four islands of the archipelago.…”

“…Given the taxonomic complexity of rove-beetles ( Coleoptera , Staphylinidae ), it is common that many collected individuals are misidentified or remain identified at genus or family level. In this study, we compiled all these records about Staphylinidae from three previous studies ( Borges et al 2021 , Borges et al 2022c , Borges et al 2022e ), that were posteriorly identified by expert Staphylinidae taxonomists. Consequently, this contribution has the main objective to provide the most updated inventory of Staphylinidae family ( Coleoptera , Insecta ) for the Azores, by including records collected between July 1999 and September 2020, in several habitat types of five islands of the Archipelago (Flores, Graciosa, Terceira, São Miguel and Santa Maria).…”