How Do Morphological Traits and Abundance Reflect the Effects of Land Use Change in a Seasonal Floodable Savannah? A Dung Beetle Case in the Brazilian Pantanal

ABSTRACT The impacts of land‐use change on biodiversity may be studied through different approaches and biological scales, being abundance and morphological traits two trustworthy variables that can depict a cause‐and‐consequence scenario of environmental transformations at the population scale. In the tropics, native non‐forested ecosystems structure complex ecological communities, with species presenting complex responses toward environmental shifts. We investigated the effects of land‐use change on the abundance and morphological traits of dung beetle species in one of the major Neotropical wetlands, the Brazilian Pantanal. To achieve this, we sampled individuals of two widely distributed South American dung beetle species, Dichotomius bos and Dichotomius nisus , across native grasslands, exotic pastures, and soybean fields. We measured individuals' body mass, pronotum length/width ratio, relative protibial size, elytra length/width ratio, and size of pronotum relative to abdomen size—which are directly linked to ecosystem functions provided by dung beetles. Exotic pastures and soybean croplands had a higher abundance of dung beetles than native grasslands. Furthermore, soybean croplands had individuals with a lower pronotum length/width ratio than in native grasslands and exotic pastures for both species studied. Morphological traits in D. nisus were more strongly influenced by land‐use change than those in D. bos , indicating that even closely related species may respond differently to habitat alterations due to different ecological adaptations. Finally, these findings highlight that morphological traits are sensitive to land‐use changes in non‐forested ecosystems and could be important to complement the information obtained from studies that used community metrics.