Relationship of insect biomass and richness with land use along a climate gradient

This dataset contains data from a field study conducted in 2019 and described in the paper \"Relationship of insect biomass and richness with land use along a climate gradient\" by Uhler et al.

In this study, arthropod communities were collected by Malaisetraps along a land use and climate gradient and identified by Metabarcoding. Malaise traps are versatile passive net-traps, capable of catching a large spectrum of insect taxa and are very effective when the aim is to get a representative snapshot of the local insect community. Overall, 179 Malaise traps were set up in 2019 along a gradient of increasing land use intensity, ranging from forests, to meadows, to arable fields, and settlements. The analyzed sites were spatially distributed over 400km and covered an elevational gradient of 1000m.

Generalized additive models were fitted to test for the effects of local and landscape-level land-use categories on insect biomass and species richness.

We found the largest difference in b...