DOI: 10.6078/d1cd97
title: Data from: Land use change through the lens of macroecology: insights from Azorean arthropods and the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology

description: Abstract from Brush et al. (2022) Ecography: Human activity and land
 management practices, in particular land use change, have resulted in the
 global loss of biodiversity. These types of disturbance affect the shape
 of macroecological patterns, and therefore analyzing these patterns can
 provide insights into how ecosystems are affected by land use change. We
 here use arthropod census data from 96 sites at Terceira Island in the
 Azores archipelago across four different land uses of increasing
 management intensity: native forest, exotic forest, semi-natural pasture,
 and intensive pasture, to examine the effects of land use type on three
 macroecological patterns: the species abundance distribution, the
 metabolic rate distribution of individuals, and the species--area
 relationship. The Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (METE) has
 successfully predicted these patterns across habitats and taxa in
 undisturbed ecosystems, and thus provides a null expectation for their
 shapes. Across these patterns, we find that the forest habitats are the
 best fit by METE predictions, while the semi-natural pasture is
 consistently the worst fit, and the intensive pasture is intermediately
 well fit. We show that the direction of failure of the METE predictions at
 the pasture sites is likely due to the hyper-dominance of introduced
 spider species present there. We hypothesize that the particularly poor
 fit for the semi-natural pasture is due to the mix of arthropod
 communities out of equilibrium, leading to greater heterogeneity in
 composition and complex dynamics that violate METE's assumption of
 static state variables. The comparative better fit for the intensive
 pasture plausibly results from more homogeneous arthropod communities that
 are well adapted to intensive management, and thus whose state variables
 are less in flux. Analyzing deviations from theoretical predictions across
 land use type provides useful information about how land use and
 disturbance affect ecosystems, and such comparisons could be useful across
 other habitats and taxa.
description: The arthropod samples were collected using pitfall traps across
 96 sites at Terceira Island in the Azores archipelago. Each of the sites
 has a single 150 m transect with 30 pitfall traps spaced out at 5 m
 intervals: 15 traps filled with approximately 60 mL of a non-attractive
 solution (anti-freeze liquid) with a small proportion of ethylene glycol,
 and 15 traps with the same volume of a general attractive solution
 (Turquin), which was made of dark beer and some preservatives. All data
 were collected over summers on Terceira Island over the period from
 1997-2009 (for more details, see Borges et al. (2005)
 <em>Biodiversity & Conservation </em>14.9, Cardoso et
 al. (2009) <em>Acta Oecologica </em>35.5, and Rigal et al.
 (2018) <em>Diversity and Distributions </em>24.1).
 Body size measurements included are averages, and body mass is
 calculated using scaling relationships as outlined in the supporting
 information of Brush et al.
 (2022) <em>Ecography.</em>
description: A Readme is included with more information about how this data
 was used in relation to the ecography paper, and what each file
 contains.