Urbanization impoverishes taxonomic but not functional diversity of the gut microbiota in a forest specialist ground beetle, Carabus convexus.

Symbiotic microorganisms living in the digestive tracts of invertebrates can be crucial in host-symbiont interactions, as they play fundamental roles in important biological processes. Urbanization-related habitat alteration and disturbance, however, considerably affect the environment of host insects, from which their gut microbiota is derived. Still, relatively few studies, all on flying insects, have assessed the impact of urbanization on the gut microbiota of insects.

Gut Bacterial Communities in the Ground Beetle .

Biological interactions, including symbiotic ones, have vital roles in ecological and evolutionary processes. Microbial symbionts in the intestinal tracts, known as the gut microbiome, are especially important because they can fundamentally influence the life history, fitness, and competitiveness of their hosts. Studies on the gut-resident microorganisms of wild animals focus mainly on vertebrates, and studies on species-rich invertebrate taxa, such as ground beetles, are sparse.

Urbanization reduces gut bacterial microbiome diversity in a specialist ground beetle, Carabus convexus.

Urbanization is rapidly shaping and transforming natural environments, creating networks of modified land types. These urbanization-driven modifications lead to local extinctions of several species, but the surviving ones also face numerous novel selection pressures, including exposure to pollutants, habitat alteration, and shifts in food availability and diversity. Based on the assumption that the environmental pool of microorganisms is reduced in urban habitats due to habitat alteration, biodiversity loss, and pollution, we hypothesized that the diversity of bacterial microbiome in digestive tracts of arthropods would be lower in urban than rural habitats.

Ecological filtering shapes the impacts of agricultural deforestation on biodiversity.

The biodiversity impacts of agricultural deforestation vary widely across regions. Previous efforts to explain this variation have focused exclusively on the landscape features and management regimes of agricultural systems, neglecting the potentially critical role of ecological filtering in shaping deforestation tolerance of extant species assemblages at large geographical scales via selection for functional traits. Here we provide a large-scale test of this role using a global database of species abundance ratios between matched agricultural and native forest sites that comprises 71 avian assemblages reported in 44 primary studies, and a companion database of 10 functional traits for all 2,647 species involved.

Discordant spatiotemporal dynamics of functional and phylogenetic diversity of rotiferan communities exposed to aquaculture effluent.

The growth of the human population brought about the global intensification of aquacultural production, and aquaculture became the fastest growing animal husbandry sector. Effluent from aquaculture is an anthropogenic environmental burden, containing organic matter, nutrients and suspended solids that affect water quality especially in the water bodies of high biodiversity and conservation value. Water quality assessment often relies on bioindicators, analysing changes in taxonomic diversity of various freshwater organismal groups.