Diversidade de besouros rola bosta em campinaranas conservadas e degradadas na Amazônia Central

Abstract

Campinarana is a fragile white-sand Amazonian ecosystem, in which mining activities highlight as an important driver of landscape transformation that challenges biodiversity maintenance. Through taxonomic diversity, functional-group approaches, and species biomass, the dung beetles have been successfully used as proxies to understand the consequences of habitat transformation on ecological communities in the tropics. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of habitat transformation in Campinaranas on the dung beetle assemblages, by analyzing their total data and its functional groups. Dung beetles were sampled in two habitat types: conserved Campinaranas (12 sites), and disturbed ones (11 sites), which were deforested due to mining activities. A total of 1,592 beetles from 43 species were collected in conserved Campinaranas and 459 beetles from 11 species were collected in disturbed Campinaranas. Conserved Campinaranas encompassed higher abundance, diversity, biomass, and their dung beetle assemblages were structurally distinct from disturbed Campinaranas. The abundance of roller dung beetles was not affected by habitat type. Our results suggest that conserved Campinaranas dwell sensitive ecological communities, with most of the species being unable to colonize mining sites. The distinct assemblage observed between the two studied Campinaranas suggest that a subset of species of the regional pool are specialized in inhabiting open areas. Under the current alarming deforestation rates in Amazon, it is urgent to unravel how tolerant are the ecological communities towards novel variegated landscape to mitigate the negative effects of human activities on biodiversity.