Data from: Land use change through the lens of macroecology: insights from Azorean arthropods and the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology

Abstract from Brush et al. (2022) Ecography: Human activity and land
management practices, in particular land use change, have resulted in the
global loss of biodiversity. These types of disturbance affect the shape
of macroecological patterns, and therefore analyzing these patterns can
provide insights into how ecosystems are affected by land use change. We
here use arthropod census data from 96 sites at Terceira Island in the
Azores archipelago across four different land uses of increasing
management intensity: native forest, exotic forest, semi-natural pasture,
and intensive pasture, to examine the effects of land use type on three
macroecological patterns: the species abundance distribution, the
metabolic rate distribution of individuals, and the species--area
relationship. The Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (METE) has
successfully predicted these patterns across habitats and taxa in
undisturbed ecosystems, and thus provides a null expectation for their
shapes. Across these patterns, we find that the forest habitats are the
best fit by METE predictions, while the semi-natural pasture is
consistently the worst fit, and the intensive pasture is intermediately
well fit. We show that the direction of failure of the METE predictions at
the pasture sites is likely due to the hyper-dominance of introduced
spider species present there. We hypothesize that the particularly poor
fit for the semi-natural pasture is due to the mix of arthropod
communities out of equilibrium, leading to greater heterogeneity in
composition and complex dynamics that violate METE's assumption of
static state variables. The comparative better fit for the intensive
pasture plausibly results from more homogeneous arthropod communities that
are well adapted to intensive management, and thus whose state variables
are less in flux. Analyzing deviations from theoretical predictions across
land use type provides useful information about how land use and
disturbance affect ecosystems, and such comparisons could be useful across
other habitats and taxa.