Increasing influence of the surrounding landscape on saproxylic beetle communities over 10 years succession in dead wood

In a previous study of saproxylic beetle fauna on fresh artificially created high stumps of spruce and birch on 20 clear-cuts (whereof 10 in hotspots) we found only weak relations between beetle fauna and forest-landscape variables associated with hotspots for biodiversity. The stumps were distributed over a large part of south Sweden in an area covering 200 km from East to West and 50 km North to South. The result gave weak support for the strategy of concentrating measures to mitigate the decrease of dead-wood dependent insects to hotspots. We hypothesised that the relationships would be stronger when the wood was in a later successional stage, as hanbitat predictability increases with a …