Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Strong Trait Correlation And Phylogenetic Signal In North American Ground Beetle (Carabidae) Morphology, Jacob D. Stachewicz, Nicholas M. Fountain-Jones, Austin Koontz, Hillary Woolf, William D. Pearse, Amanda S. Gallinat

Geography Faculty Articles

Functional traits mediate species’ responses to, and roles within, their environment and are constrained by evolutionary history. While we have a strong understanding of trait evolution for macrotaxa such as birds and mammals, our understanding of invertebrates is comparatively limited. Here, we address this gap in North American beetles with a sample of ground beetles (Carabidae), leveraging a large-scale collection and digitization effort by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). For 154 ground beetle species, we measured seven morphological traits, which we placed into a recently developed effect–response framework that characterizes traits by how they predict species’ effects on their …