Diversidade de besouros rola-bostas (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae) em cenários simulados de substituições entre florestas nativas e plantações de eucalipto na Amazônia

Abstract

The transformation of natural landscapes through land-use conversion is a global phenomenon that impacts biodiversity and ecological dynamics. The expansion of eucalyptus plantations, driven by their economic profitability and the growing demand for forest products, has become common in many tropical regions. However, these plantations drastically alter the structure and composition of ecosystems, affecting diversity patterns. This transformation generates landscape heterogeneity, resulting from the coexistence of different habitat types, which plays a crucial role in the dynamics of biological communities. In insect groups, such as dung beetles (Scarabaeinae), the interaction between eucalyptus plantations and forest areas can generate complex diversity patterns, with distinct community responses across space and time. This dissertation proposes to explore, through simulated scenarios based on real data, how the simultaneous replacement of forest areas with eucalyptus plantations impacts dung beetle communities. The focus is on the effects of habitat replacement on the diversity of these communities and their responses across different diversity metrics. The dissertation is divided into three parts: the first presents a theoretical framework based on general concepts; the second introduces the topic; and the third presents the results, where we investigate the responses of dung beetle communities to habitat replacement between forests and eucalyptus plantations. To achieve this, we conducted simulations of replacement scenarios to evaluate how different proportions of eucalyptus and forest impact the diversity of these communities. Our results, derived from simulated scenarios of habitat replacement between forest areas and eucalyptus plantations, highlight the complexity and asymmetrical responses of dung beetle communities to land-use changes. We observed that the conversion of forest areas into eucalyptus plantations results in a decrease in species richness and abundance, while the reverse scenario promotes partial, but not complete, recovery. Although the coexistence of both habitat types in smaller proportions can maintain some heterogeneity in the landscape structure, this configuration influences the compositional diversity of communities. We demonstrated that an increase in eucalyptus leads to dissimilarity between sites, which can mask species loss.