“Back to the Fundamentals”: Global Trophic Levels and Functional Groups respond differently to Land Use Impacts

A global understanding of biodiversity responses to land use impacts can improve our future prediction to aid conservation planning and management. However, two problems hinder this: 1.) Land use impact studies are taxonomically biased. 2.) Land use history is understudied; To tackle these challenges, the function of biodiversity (trophic levels and functional groups) is focused on equally exploring responses to the effect of land type and intensity (LUTI), and history (LUH). I used PREDICTS to calculate LUTI species richness and assigned trophic levels and functional groups using Newbold et al.'s (2020) dataset, cGloNAF, and FunGuild. LUH was calculated from LUH-v2h. The species richness, LUH, and LUTI were modelled with a generalised linear mixed-effect model. Land use responses showed that producers’ richness benefited from intermediate disturbances, while consumers and decomposers suffered. Producers’ and decomposers’ species richness is better modelled by LUH, suggesting a soil legacy effect. Consumers were more impacted by LUTI. Responses to LUH revealed a co-interaction effect of: R-strategy dominating early recovery, carnivores and omnivores targeting sensitive herbivores, and decomposers richness depending on plant hosts. This study revealed the hidden responses of biodiversity function to LUTI and LUH. Future studies can aim to build on my work with finer functional groups, better fungal records, or incorporate distance to the closest forest.