ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 168 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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168 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 728 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
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- Effects of Habitat Types on Pollinators and Seasonal Variations in Plant-Insect Pollination Networks in Nanchong, China.Insects · 2026Article
- Playing it safe at early life stages: Balancing energy allocations to maximize fitness under seasonal pathogen dynamics.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Many small climate change impacts presage rapid population extinction in a common iconic bird.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Bee (Hymenoptera) bycatch assemblages collected in bowl traps at interfaces of cotton agroecosystems in Alabama.Environmental entomology · 2026Article
- Forest Degradation and Weather Jointly Affect Early-Life Development in a Tropical Understory Bird.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Estimating global bee species richness and taxonomic gaps.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Arthropod species loss underpins biomass declines.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Froth, Fields, and Future Directions: Scientometric and Integrative Review of the Recent Latin American Cercopidae Literature.Neotropical entomology · 2025Review
- Why just fly?Fly · 2025Review
- Food webs can deliver win-win strategies for tropical agroforestry and biodiversity conservation.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- Life under leaves: substrate-borne vibrations provide a window into the behavior and ecology of two miniaturized geckos.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Are Findings of Key Insect Metrics Generalizable Across Different Taxa in Malaise Trap Samples?Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- EntoSieve: Automated Size-Sorting of Insect Bulk Samples to Aid Accurate Megabarcoding and Metabarcoding.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- Effects of land cover and protected areas on flying insect diversity.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Standardized diversity estimation uncovers global distribution patterns and drivers of stream insects.npj biodiversity · 2025Article
- US Imperiled species and the five drivers of biodiversity loss.Bioscience · 2025Article
- Up High, Hot and Dry: Individual Reproductive Output in Subalpine Bees Declines With Increasing Drought Severity.Global change biology · 2025Article
- The importance of being heterogeneous: the complex phase behaviour of insect cuticular hydrocarbons.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
108 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A number of studies indicate that tropical arthropods should be particularly vulnerable to climate warming. If these predictions are realized, climate warming may have a more profound impact on the functioning and diversity of tropical forests than currently anticipated. Although arthropods comprise over two-thirds of terrestrial species, information on their abundance and extinction rates in tropical habitats is severely limited. Here we analyze data on arthropod and insectivore abundances taken between 1976 and 2012 at two midelevation habitats in Puerto Rico's Luquillo rainforest. During this time, mean maximum temperatures have risen by 2.0 °C. Using the same study area and methods employed by Lister in the 1970s, we discovered that the dry weight biomass of arthropods captured in sweep samples had declined 4 to 8 times, and 30 to 60 times in sticky traps. Analysis of long-term data on canopy arthropods and walking sticks taken as part of the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research program revealed sustained declines in abundance over two decades, as well as negative regressions of abundance on mean maximum temperatures. We also document parallel decreases in Luquillo's insectivorous lizards, frogs, and birds. While El Niño/Southern Oscillation influences the abundance of forest arthropods, climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance, indirectly precipitating a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.
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