Variation of ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) communities in NEON Domain 17 (Pacific Southwest)

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale ecological observation facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation. NEON collects long-term species abundance and diversity data, including ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae), in 47 terrestrial field sites across the United States. Carabids are important in assessing how shifts in climate are altering species-latitudinal gradients, due to their high sensitivity to abiotic factors. NEON Domain 17 (Pacific Southwest) collects carabid data in three different terrestrial sites distributed along an elevation gradient from the Sierra foothills to 2743 meters of elevation in the High Sierras. This analysis visualizes how changes in beetle abundance, diversity, and community composition from 2016 to 2019 relate to abiotic factors such as elevation, temperature, and precipitation collected by NEON instrumentation across each California site. We visualized community composition variation with a non-metric multidimensional scaling ranking order. Results indicate that the mid-elevation site at NEON Domain 17 has the highest annual abundance and diversity per trapping effort, suggesting that factors such as changes in climate and environment across the elevation gradient can influence the presence of carabids. These results highlight the need for future comparing the variation of carabid communities to fluctuations in habitat. Neon's extensive data sets can support a wide variety of independent research as well as to contribute to a better understanding of critical ecological issues.