Abstract
Restoration and conservation of grasslands is necessary to retain ecosystem services and grassland biodiversity. However, grassland restoration and conservation often focus on plant communities and do not take ecologically important animal taxa, such as insects, into account. We investigated how occupancy probabilities of beetles in the families Scarabaeidae and Carabidae were related to management practices, local landcover, and habitat features in a degraded grassland system, the Black Belt Prairie. We collected beetles from 24 sites and analyzed species detection/non-detection data and family-level abundance data with Bayesian hierarchical models. Vegetation diversity, burn frequency, agricultural landcover, and disturbed landcover were positively associated with occupancy probability, while urban landcover was negatively associated with occupancy probability, consistent with results from previous studies. We found variations in species’ habitat requirements leading to positive relationships with basal area and years since last burn for some morphospecies and negative relationships with these covariates for other morphospecies. Our results and the literature indicate variable responses to seeded versus unseeded restoration, highlighting a subject where increased understanding could advance restoration efforts. Our results indicate Solenopsis invicta has a direct negative relationship with insect communities; there has been debate in the literature about whether the negative effect associated with S. invicta has been due to S. invicta or a correlated disturbance event. Our study advances understanding about habitat associations of grassland insects and about an understudied grassland ecoregion, which can inform management of Black Belt Prairies and grasslands generally.