Living in heterogeneous woodlands - Are habitat continuity or quality drivers 
of genetic variability in a flightless ground beetle?

Marcus, Tamar; Boch, Steffen; Durka, Walter; Fischer, Markus; Gossner, Martin M.; Mueller, Joerg; Schöning, Ingo; Weisser, Wolfgang W.; Drees, Claudia; Assmann, Thorsten

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0144217

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Living in heterogeneous woodlands - Are habitat continuity or quality drivers of genetic variability in a flightless ground beetle?

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons62544

Schöning, Ingo
Soil and Ecosystem Processes, Dr. M. Schrumpf, Department Biogeochemical Processes, Prof. S. E. Trumbore, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0144217
(Publisher version)

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

BGC2378.pdf
(Publisher version), 702KB

Supplementary Material (public)

BGC2378s1.zip
(Supplementary material), 7MB

Citation

Marcus, T., Boch, S., Durka, W., Fischer, M., Gossner, M. M., Mueller, J., et al. (2015). Living in heterogeneous woodlands - Are habitat continuity or quality drivers of genetic variability in a flightless ground beetle? PLoS One, 10(12): e0144217. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0144217.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0029-57A4-1

Abstract

Although genetic diversity is one of the key components of biodiversity, its drivers are still not fully understood. While it is known that genetic diversity is affected both by environmental
parameters as well as habitat history, these factors are not often tested together. Therefore,
we analyzed 14 microsatellite loci in Abax parallelepipedus, a flightless, forest dwelling
ground beetle, from 88 plots in two study regions in Germany. We modeled the effects of
historical and environmental variables on allelic richness, and found for one of the regions,
the Schorfheide-Chorin, a significant effect of the depth of the litter layer, which is a main
component of habitat quality, and of the sampling effort, which serves as an inverse proxy
for local population size. For the other region, the Schwäbische Alb, none of the potential
drivers showed a significant effect on allelic richness. We conclude that the genetic diversity
in our study species is being driven by current local population sizes via environmental variables
and not by historical processes in the studied regions. This is also supported by lack
of genetic differentiation between local populations sampled from ancient and from recent
woodlands.We suggest that the potential effects of former fragmentation and recolonization
processes have been mitigated by the large and stable local populations of Abax parallelepipedus
in combination with the proximity of the ancient and recent woodlands in the studied
landscapes.