Effect of land use change on Melolonthidae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea) beetle communities in the deforestation arc of the Brazilian Amazon

Although Amazon provides crucial goods and ecosystem services for humanity, the alarming conversion of its original ecosystem due to agricultural activities challenges the maintenance of biodiversity in this rainforest. Beetles from the family Melolonthidae serve as a proxy for assessing the effect of land use change on biodiversity. In this study, we evaluated the effect of land use changes on the entire Melolonthidae community (species richness, abundance, and biomass) and on each subfamily (Rutelinae, Melolonthinae, and Dynastinae). Peach palm Bactris gasipaes Kunth (Arecaceae) plantation, coffee Coffea canephora Pierre ex A. Froehner (Rubiaceae) plantation, pasture Urochloa decumbens Stapf. (Poaceae), Forest remnants had their Melolonthidae communities assessed in a southern Amazon region. Forest remnants encompassed a higher species richness of the Melolonthidae and Rutelinae compared to the other habitats, while pasture areas had a higher abundance of Melolonthidae, Dynastinae, an..., Study area
This study was carried out in Juína municipality, which is located in the Amazonian ‘arc of deforestation’, in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil (11°25’ S; 58°46’ W; 320 m a.s.l., see Figures 1a and 1b). The climate of the region is a transition between tropical monsoon (Am) and tropical warm and humid (Aw) according to the Köppen classification (Alvares et al., 2014). The region has ca. 2,000 mm of mean annual rainfall and a mean temperature of 24 °C, ranging between 20 and 40 °C (Batistão et al., 2013). There are two marked seasons: the dry season (from May to September, with less than 100 mm of mean monthly rainfall) and the rainy season (from October to April, with ca. 330 mm of mean monthly rainfall (Alvares et al., 2014). The dominant physiognomy is terra firme, a non-floodable evergreen rainforest; besides terra firme, there are floodable patches of tropical rainforest (várzea).
Therefore, this study was performed in a conserved forest and three other habitat types repr..., # Effect of land use change on Melolonthidae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea) beetle communities in the deforestation arc of the Brazilian Amazon

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.s7h44j1k3](10.5061/dryad.s7h44j1k3)

## Description of the data and file structure

This database contains the supplementary material, the raw data used to analyse the data of the manuscript, as well as the statistics. In this dryad file, we will clarify the meaning of each data point and table.

### Files and variables

#### File: 22.05.25Supplementary_material.docx

**Description:** 

In the following lines, we have explained column data that are not self-explanatory in the tables of this Dryad file.

In table S1:

* Area: Replicate unit of each habitat (coffee, peach palm, pasture, forest).
* S: Coordinates of the southern part of the studied areas.
* N: Coordinates of the northern hemisphere of the studied areas.

In Table S2:

* Distribution: Data-type distribution used in the statistical model.
* Chi: Chi-square v...,