, 1999, Elek et al., 2001, Finch, 2005, Fuller et al., 2008, Yu et al., 2008, Yu et al., 2009 and Oxbrough et al., 2010). However, pine and oak forests, characterised by high canopy cover, contained distinct carabid assemblages within our study region, with high canopy cover thought to be a prerequisite for the occurrence of forest specialists (Niemelä and Spence, 1994, Jukes et al., 2001, Mullen et al., 2008, Yu et al., 2008 and Oxbrough et al., 2010). Our finding that larch plantations harboured slightly less species-rich and much more

homogeneous carabid assemblages than pine plantations, is coherent with observations from Europe and North America that report differences in beetle assemblages among different conifer plantations. Such differences are again linked to shifts in environmental variables and associated microclimatic conditions (Humphrey et al., 1999, Ings and Hartley, 1999 and Finch, 2005). In our selleck kinase inhibitor study, three factors may be relevant: (1) larch forest specialists are unlikely to occur in the study area, Fulvestrant molecular weight due to L.principis-rupprechtii naturally occurring at much

higher elevations than the study area ( Zhang et al., 2009), (2) the uniformly lighter canopy of larch in comparison to both native oak and pine forests, which exhibit greater heterogeneity in canopy cover, might render larch forests less suitable for the local forest carabid species pool, favouring a smaller range of more generalist species, and (3) humification of larch litter is reportedly about a third slower than pine litter and two to three times slower than birch leaf litter (

Vedrova, 1997), which leads to distinct differences in epigeic conditions that may also affect prey densities. The first two factors can also be assumed to be at work within birch forests, with the observed homogeneity and overlap in carabid species composition within and between these two forest types further supporting this assumption. P-type ATPase Niemelä et al., 1992 and Niemelä et al., 1996 argue that a high density of ground vegetation potentially inhibits the movement and prey capture of forest carabids, whereas Elek et al. (2001) state that increased ground cover can lead to an enhanced abundance of potential prey. Nonetheless, the influence of the ground vegetation density appears limited in our study, since birch forests had much less dense undergrowth, but yielded very similar samples, both in abundance and assemblage structure, to larch forests with their distinctly denser undergrowth. The homogeneity and similarity in the beetle assemblages in larch and birch forests could be partly attributable to the comparatively cold and exposed conditions of these forests due to their northern exposition, potentially allowing only a limited beetle species pool to thrive in these locations.