Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2024

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Biology

Degree Program

Biology, PhD

Committee Chair

Yanoviak, Stephen

Committee Member

Emery, Sarah

Committee Member

Lackey, Alycia

Committee Member

Christian, Natalie

Committee Member

Rieske-Kinney, Lynne

Author's Keywords

arthropods; disturbance; forests; fire; lightning; ecology

Abstract

Disturbances in forests often generate dead wood, which is an important resource for a variety of arthropods. In tropical wet forests where fire is rare, lightning and branchfalls are common disturbances that create canopy gaps with associated large amounts of localized dead wood. By contrast, prescribed fire is a common disturbance in temperate forest that creates habitat heterogeneity and widely dispersed dead wood resources. The ecological effects of these disturbances on arthropod communities are largely unknown. This dissertation investigates how disturbance and habitat associations in both tropical and temperate forest shape arthropod ecology. Throughout, I primarily focus on beetles, ants, and spiders due to their diversity, abundance, and ease of sampling. Chapters two and three show that lightning-disturbed tropical forest in Panama supports more consumers and distinct beetle assemblages vs. undisturbed forest. When compared to branchfalls, lightning-disturbed forest had similar levels of arthropod diversity, but beetle assemblage composition was distinct between the two. Following two years of succession, beetle assemblages were compositionally similar to those of undisturbed forest, but spiders and ants remained more abundant and species-rich in lightning- and branchfall-disturbed forest. Chapter four shows that prescribed fire in temperate deciduous forest supports distinct beetle and wood-cavity inhabiting arthropod assemblages that are partly structured by fire severity and wood cavity characteristics such as cavity diameter. Differences in beetle assemblage composition between higher-severity, lower-severity, and unburned forest remained after two years, but wood cavity occupancy rates recovered after two years—presumably due to wood cavities no longer being a limiting resource. Chapter five shows that habitat preference by three saproxylic beetle species in temperate deciduous forest is associated with their thermal tolerance limits. I found that thermal tolerance varied predictably with mass intraspecifically, but species that inhabited warmer portions of dead wood did not have higher thermal tolerances. The studies presented here highlight the ability of forest disturbance and habitat characteristics to shape arthropod ecology.

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