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.

中文翻译：

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宏观生态学视角下的土地利用变化：亚速尔群岛节肢动物的见解和生态学的最大熵理论

人类活动和土地管理实践，特别是土地利用变化，已导致全球生物多样性丧失。这些类型的干扰影响宏观生态模式的形状，因此分析这些模式可以深入了解生态系统如何受到土地利用变化的影响。我们在这里使用来自亚速尔群岛特塞拉岛 96 个地点的节肢动物普查数据，这些数据涉及四种不同的土地利用，管理强度不断增加：原生森林、外来森林、半天然牧场和集约化牧场，以检查土地利用类型对三个方面的影响。宏观生态模式：物种丰度分布、个体代谢率分布和物种-面积关系。生态学的最大熵理论 (METE) 成功地预测了在未受干扰的生态系统中跨越栖息地和分类群的这些模式，因此对它们的形状提供了一个零期望。在这些模式中，我们发现森林栖息地最适合 METE 预测，而半天然牧场始终是最不适合的，而集约型牧场则适中。我们表明，牧场地点 METE 预测的失败方向可能是由于那里存在的引入蜘蛛物种的超优势。我们假设对半天然牧场的适应性特别差是由于节肢动物群落的混合不平衡，导致成分的更大异质性和复杂的动力学，这违反了 METE 对静态变量的假设。更适合集约化牧场的比较可能是由于更均匀的节肢动物群落更适合集约化管理，因此其状态变量的变化较小。分析土地利用类型与理论预测的偏差提供了有关土地利用和干扰如何影响生态系统的有用信息，并且这种比较可能对其他栖息地和分类群有用。