Climate, topography and the 3D structure of forests are major drivers affecting local species communities. However, little is known about how the specific functional traits of saproxylic (wood-living) beetles, involved in the recycling of wood, might be affected by those environmental characteristics.Here, we combine ecological and morphological traits available for saproxylic beetles and airborne laser scanning (ALS) data in Bayesian trait-based joint species distribution models to study how traits drive the distributions of more than 230 species in temperate forests of Europe.We found that elevation (as a proxy for temperature and precipitation) and the proportion of conifers played important roles in species occurrences while variables related to habitat heterogeneity and forest complexity were less relevant. Furthermore, we showed that local communities were shaped by environmental variation primarily through their ecological traits whereas morphological traits were involved only marginally. As predicted, ecological traits influenced species' responses to forest structure, and to other environmental variation, with canopy niche, wood decay niche and host preference as the most important ecological traits. Conversely, no links between morphological traits and environmental characteristics were observed. Both models, however, revealed strong phylogenetic signal in species' response to environmental characteristics.These findings imply that alterations of climate and tree species composition have the potential to alter saproxylic beetle communities in temperate forests. Additionally, ecological traits help explain species' responses to environmental characteristics and thus should prove useful in predicting their responses to future change. It remains challenging, however, to link simple morphological traits to species' complex ecological niches. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Bavarian Forest National Park Grafenau Germany

Department of Biological and Environmental Science University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä Finland

Department of Biology Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim Norway

Department of Ecology and Ecosystem management Technische Universität München Freising Weihenstephan Germany

Department of Environmental Systems Science ETH Zurich Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems Zurich Switzerland

Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management Norwegian University of Life Sciences Ås Norway

Field Station Fabrikschleichach Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology Biocenter University of Würzburg Rauhenebrach Germany

Forest Entomology Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL Birmensdorf Switzerland

Forest Inventory and Remote Sensing University of Göttingen Göttingen Germany

Institute of Biology and Environmental Science Vegetation Science and Nature Conservation University of Oldenburg Oldenburg Germany

Institute of Entomology Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences Ceske Budejovice Czech Republic

Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Programme University of Helsinki Helsinki Finland

Silviculture and Forest Ecology of the Temperate Zones University of Göttingen Göttingen Germany

SLU Swedish Species Information Centre Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Uppsala Sweden

U S Geological Survey Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center La Crosse Wisconsin USA

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Alternative measures of trait-niche relationships: A test on dispersal traits in saproxylic beetles

High-resolution 3D forest structure explains ecomorphological trait variation in assemblages of saproxylic beetles

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