Dung beetles of Azorean cattle-grazed pasturelands - data of the DUNGPOOL project

The data we present are part of the project DUNGPOOL, which aims to evaluate the effects of the species pool, community assembly processes and increasing temperatures on the local diversity and ecosystem functions performed by dung beetles in island and mainland cattle-grazed pasturelands. By combining replicated field experiments on the Iberian Peninsula with parallel work on three mid-Atlantic islands (Pico, Faial and Terceira, Azores), the project exploits the natural contrast between a species-rich mainland pool and the species-poor, largely exotic island pools, to test explicit biodiversity-ecosystem-function (BEF) hypotheses across spatial scales.From June to July 2024, dung beetles were sampled in 84 locations of the three islands of the Azores Archipelago (Portugal), using 306 pitfall traps baited with fresh cow dung.

A total of 1,141 dung beetle individuals were recorded across these islands: 18 individuals in Pico Island, 480 individuals in Faial Island and 643 individuals in Terceira Island. These individuals were distributed amongst four species from the family Scarabaeidae (Insecta, Coleoptera): Calamosternus granarius (Linnaeus, 1767), Labarrus lividus (Olivier, 1789), Onthophagus taurus (Schreber, 1759) and Onthophagus medius (Kugelann, 1792). The species O. medius is a new record for this Archipelago and we propose that previous historical records of Onthophagus vacca (Linnaeus, 1767) should now be considered a regional synonym of Onthophagus medius.