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Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Student Competition 10-Minute Paper

Grad P-IE: Biodiversity and Ecology On-Demand Presentations

Structure vs. composition: terrestrial LiDAR elucidates canopy influence on insect functional groups in invaded forests

On-Demand
Student Competition On-Demand
Forest canopies hold the majority of animal biodiversity globally. Yet, how the structural vs. compositional components of canopies influence biodiversity is not well understood. Here, we use terrestrial LiDAR in relating structural metrics (vegetation density) and canopy composition (invasive shrubs and tree genera) to the diversity of four insect functional groups in Georgia, USA: woodboring beetles, mycophagous beetles, bees, and litter-foraging ants. From our generalized linear models, we found that the importance of these measures differed greatly among functional groups. Woodboring beetles were negatively influenced more strongly by invasive shrubs than vegetation density and also responded positively to tree and deadwood diversity. By contrast, mycophagous beetles were negatively influenced by vegetation density but unaffected by invasive shrubs. They were also sensitive to tree composition and deadwood volume. Bees were unaffected by vegetation density and invasive shrubs, but were sensitive to tree composition and were positively related to flowering tree diversity. Ants were negatively influenced by invasive shrubs and were sensitive to tree composition. Thus, both forest structure and composition are important to insects, but with idiosyncratic responses among functional groups. Our results demonstrate the utility of terrestrial LiDAR in clarifying the relationship between structure and biodiversity in forest canopies.