Isolation drives species gains and losses of insect metacommunities over time in a mountaintop forest archipelago

Aim: We evaluated the effects of forest island size, isolation, and area in the landscape driving temporal changes of insect biodiversity in a mountaintop forest archipelago. We tested the following hypotheses: (i) changes in insect species composition is higher and dominated by species gains through time in smaller but less isolated forest islands; (ii) larger amounts of forest in the landscape result in higher gains of more vagile species over time, regardless of their size and isolation; (iii) heterogenization processes will prevail in less vagile groups, while homogenization processes will dominate in highly vagile groups due to differences in dispersal capability.
Location: Espinhaço Range Biosphere Reserve, Brazil.
Taxon: Insects.
Methods: We used ants, dung beetles, bees, wasps, and butterflies as study models to represent a gradient of low-to-high dispersal capability. We evaluated the colonization- and extirpation-resultant components of temporal β-diversity using area- and iso..., , , # Title of Dataset: Insect\_Capoes\_PELD-CRSC

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This dataset contains occurrence data for five groups of insect species (S=277 species; ants, bees, butterflies, dung beetles, and wasps in columns titled as \"Species\") in natural forest islands (capes de mata, coded C01 to C14 in lines titled as \"Group\") in Serra do Cipó, Minas Gerais, Brazil. These forest islands are common on mountaintops of at least 1200 m a.s.l. and have a floristic composition similar to the semi-deciduous forests associated with the Atlantic Forest domain. We sampled the insects in 14 forest islands, which differed in size, distances from each other, and distances from a continuous forest (i.e., possible species source). In the central region of each forest island, we installed a 20-50 m plot, where specific traps were installed for each insect group. We sampled insects during the summers (January or February, middle of the rainy season) of 2014, 2015, 2018, and 2020, coded as \"Year\". In 2014 and 2015, we were u...