Elevational variation of spider and insect communities in the Swedish mountains

• Published in: Ecosphere
• Main Authors: Måsviken, Johannes, Marquina, Daniel, Norén, Karin, Dalén, Love, Dalerum, Fredrik
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (España)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Ecological Society of America 2023
• Subjects: Altitude; Araneae; Arthropoda; Insecta; Latitude; Mountain ecology; Spatial structure; Species composition; Species richness; Taxonomic diversity; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/366657; https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4540

© 2023 The Authors. Ecosphere published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Mountain topography gives rise to often dramatic climate-driven elevation gradients in primary productivity, which can generate substantial biodiversity variation. Therefore, mountain areas may be particularly useful for evaluating the ecological consequences of climate change. Arthropods are the most diverse animal phylum, which play important roles in most ecosystems. However, despite their ecological importance, we have limited information on how arthropods vary along elevation gradients. We investigated how taxonomic richness, taxonomic composition, and spatial structuring of spider and insect communities varied along elevation gradients and among three geographic locations in a mountain region of northern Sweden. The locations provided a latitude gradient spanning approximately 3° (from 62° N to 65° N), but were otherwise selected to contain similar environmental characteristics. Taxonomic richness of both spiders and insects declined monotonically with increasing elevation, and there were limited differences between the geographic locations in such declines. Taxonomic composition varied with elevation for both taxonomic groups, but also differed among the three sites. Linyphiid spiders were more widely distributed along the elevation gradients than other spider taxa, whereas a broad taxonomic range of insects occurred over almost all elevations. We observed nested as well as modular spatial distributions of both spider and insect communities along the elevation gradients. While the modular patterns suggest that species turnover has generated distinct communities at different elevations, some generalist species were still widespread throughout large parts of the gradients. Our results point to ...