The importance of flowers for beetle biodiversity and abundance

Abstract

The rainforest canopy supports a large, but as yet uncertain proportion of global biodiversity (Price 2002; Ozanne et al. 2003; Grimbacher and Stork 2007). The high species richness of plants and animals in the canopy and their interactions have been shown to be strongly influential in determining food web dynamics (Novotny et al. 2010) and form the basis for many estimates of global species richness (Erwin 1982; Stork 1993; Ødegaard 2000a; Novotny et al. 2002; Hamilton et al. 2010). However, while the high diversity of invertebrates in rainforest canopies is acknowledged (Southwood 1961; Erwin 1982; Moran and Southwood 1982; Stork 1988), the logistical difficulties in accessing the canopy have placed sampling limitations on previous biodiversity and ecological studies. Consequently, most studies to date have used sampling techniques that indiscriminately sample many arboreal microhabitats together, such as insecticide fogging (Erwin 1982; Moran and Southwood 1982; Stork 1988) or flight interception/Malaise traps (Stork and Grimbacher 2006), or focus only on sampling species from leaves as the dominant habitat (Novotny and Basset 2005).