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Modeling the extinction risk of European butterflies and odonates
Insect populations have become increasingly threatened during the last decades due to climate change and landuse intensification. Species characteristics driving these threats remain poorly understood. Trait-based analyses provide a straight-forward approach to gain a mechanistic understanding o...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Philipps-Universität Marburg
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | PDF Full Text |
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| Summary: | Insect populations have become increasingly threatened during the last decades due
to climate change and landuse intensification. Species characteristics driving these
threats remain poorly understood. Trait-based
analyses provide a straight-forward
approach to gain a mechanistic understanding of species' extinction risk, guiding
the development of conservation strategies. We combined morphological traits and
phylogenetic relationship for 332 European species of butterflies and 115 species of
odonates (dragon and damselflies) to model their red list status via phylogenetically
controlled ordered logistic regression. We hypothesized that extinction risk increases
with increasing body volume and wing area, decreasing range size, and is larger for
brighter species. All investigated traits exhibited a strong phylogenetic signal. When
controlling for phylogenetic relationship, we found that extinction risk of butterflies
increased with decreasing range size. The extinction risk of odonates showed no relationship
with the selected traits. Our results show that there is no universal trait
defining the extinction risk of our investigated insect taxa. Furthermore, evolutionary
history, measured as the phylogenetically predicted part of our analyzed traits, poorly
predicted extinction risk. Our study confirms the focus of conservation measures on
European butterfly species with small range sizes. |
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| Item Description: | Gefördert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der UB Marburg. |
| DOI: | 10.1002/ece3.9465 |