Data from: Specialists in ancient trees are more affected by climate than generalists

Ancient trees are considered one of the most important habitats for
biodiversity in Europe and North America. They support exceptional numbers
of specialized species, including a range of rare and endangered
wood-living insects. In this study, we use a dataset of 105 sites spanning
a climatic gradient along the oak range of Norway and Sweden to
investigate the importance of temperature and precipitation on beetle
species richness in ancient, hollow oak trees. We expected that increased
summer temperature would positively influence all wood-living beetle
species whereas precipitation would be less important with a negligible or
negative impact. Surprisingly, only oak-specialist beetles with a northern
distribution increased in species richness with temperature. Few
specialist beetles and no generalist beetles responded to the rise of 4°C
in summer as covered by our climatic gradient. The negative effect of
precipitation affected more specialist species than did temperature,
whereas the generalists remained unaffected. In summary, we suggest that
increased summer temperature is likely to benefit a few specialist beetles
within this dead wood community, but a larger number of specialists are
likely to decline due to increased precipitation. In addition, generalist
species will remain unaffected. To minimize adverse impacts of climate
change on this important community, long-term management plans for ancient
trees are important.