Rapid recovery of dung beetle communities following habitat fragmentation in central Amazonia

Few studies have directly assessed how rapidly functionally important insect communities recover following rain forest loss and fragmentation. In 1986, B. Klein compared the dung and carrion beetle assemblages of clearcuts, fragmented, and non-fragmented forests in central Amazonia, reporting drastic short-term changes in community composition. Fifteen years later, we resampled the same sites using identical techniques and found that, with the regrowth of secondary vegetation between forest fragments, the initial differences had largely disappeared. As the secondary vegetation itself supports dung beetle assemblages similar to those of continuous forest, we conclude that, from the perspective of the dung beetles, the experimentally fragmented area had returned to a continuous state within approximately one decade. These results offer some good news for the conservation of tropical ecosystems, since they suggest that conditions favorable for functionally important arthropods may be quickly restored by secondary regrowth. They also suggest that the preservation of forest fragments and secondary vegetation may provide an important complement to the conservation of intact mature forest.