Work

Winter warming and agricultural plant diversification promote ground beetles and spiders with contrasted functional thermal responses

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: The impact of winter conditions on ectotherms remains poorly documented by field studies under temperate latitudes, mostly because adverse temperatures strongly limit arthropod activity. With climate change and overall rising temperatures, arthropods may become active during winter while still using thermally buffered habitats in case of extreme frost events. In cereal fields, we studied how winter temperatures and vegetation covers adjacent to crops affect predatory arthropods communities, assuming that flowering strips with a greater vegetation height could create more buffered temperature conditions than spontaneous grassy margins. Two dominant taxa, ground beetles and spiders, were sampled in 7–14 fields each year in western France over five winters, using pitfall traps. Activity, taxonomic and functional diversity, as well as species composition and traits, were linked to different temperature variables and compared between the two crop sides with different adjacent vegetation covers for ground beetles (7962 individuals / 40 species) and spiders (9545 individuals / 52 species). Higher mean winter temperatures and buffered edge flowering strips were associated with greater activity and diversity. We also identified a negative relationship between increasing temperature amplitudes and ground beetles’ metrics while the opposite was observed for spiders. The two field edge habitats resulted in the presence of distinct communities, with an early pest regulator generalist community next to grassy margins and a more thermosensitive specialist community next to flowering strips. This argues in favor of the joint use of spontaneous and sowed vegetation borders for sustaining diversified communities of beneficial organisms in agrosystems.

Source: Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment

DOI: 10.1016/j.agee.2026.110765