Local Climate Mediates Spatial and Temporal Variation in Carabid Beetle Communities on Hyangnobong, Korea

초록

Global environmental changes have the capacity to make dramatic alterations to floral and faunal composition, and elucidation of the mechanism is important for predicting its outcomes. Studies on global climate change have traditionally focused on statistical summaries within relatively wide scales of spatial and temporal changes, and less attention has been paid to variability in microclimates across spatial and temporal scales. Microclimate is a suite of climatic conditions measured in local areas near the earth’s surface. Environmental variables in microclimatic scale can be critical for the ecology of organisms inhabiting there. Here we examine the effect of spatial and temporal changes in microclimates on those of carabid beetle communities in Hyangnobong, Korea. We found that climatic variables and the patterns of annual changes in carabid beetle communities differed among sites even within the single mountain system. Our results indicate the importance of temporal survey of communities at local scales, which is expected to reveal an additional fraction of variation in communities and underlying processes that has been overlooked in studies of global community patterns and changes.

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