BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH Land use intensification differentially benefits alien over native predators in agricultural landscape mosaics Audrey A. Grez 1 *, Tatyana A. Rand 2 , Tania Zaviezo 3 and Francisca Castillo-Serey 1 1 Fac. Ciencias Veterinarias y Pecuarias, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 2 Correo 15, La Granja, Santiago, Chile, 2 USDA-ARS Northern Plains Agricultural Research Lab, 1500 North Central Ave, Sidney, MT 59270, USA, 3 Fac. Agronom  ıa e Ing. Forestal, P. Universidad Cat olica de Chile, Casilla 306 – 22, Santiago, Chile *Correspondence: Audrey A. Grez, Fac. Ciencias Veterinarias y Pecuarias, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 2 Correo 15, La Granja, Santiago, Chile. E-mail: agrez@uchile.cl ABSTRACT Aim Both anthropogenic habitat disturbance and the breadth of habitat use by alien species have been found to facilitate invasion into novel environments, and these factors have been hypothesized to be important within coccinellid communities specifically. In this study, we address two questions: (1) Do alien species benefit more than native species from human-disturbed habitats? (2) Are alien species more generalized in their habitat use than natives within the invaded range or can their abundance patterns be explained by specialization on the most common habitats? Location Chile. Methods We quantified the use of different habitat types by native and alien coccinellid beetles by sampling individuals in nine habitat types that spanned a gradient in disturbance intensity, and represented the dominant natural, semi- natural and agricultural habitats in the landscape. Results Our results provide strong support for the hypotheses that more- disturbed habitats are differentially invaded. Both the proportion of alien individuals and the proportion of alien species increased significantly with increasing disturbance intensity. In contrast, we found no evidence that alien spe- cies were more generalized in their habitat use than native species; in fact, the trend was in the opposite direction. The abundance of specialized alien coccinel- lid species was not correlated with the area of the habitat types in the landscape. Main conclusion The results suggest that successfully established alien coccin- ellid species may be ‘disturbance specialists’ that thrive within human-modified habitats. Therefore, less-disturbed agroecosystems are desirable to promote the regional conservation of native species within increasingly human-dominated landscapes. Keywords Biodiversity, Coccinellidae, habitat specialization, ladybeetles, specialists and generalists. INTRODUCTION Land use change, resulting from the destruction of natural habitats for human use, and further intensification of man- agement practices on such lands, is a leading driver of global environmental change (Sala et al., 2000; Foley et al., 2005). A reduction in area and fragmentation of the natural habitats upon which native species depend is known to result in increased extinction probabilities and declining biodiversity (Saunders et al., 1991; Wilcove et al., 1998; MEA, 2005). It is also increasingly recognized that native species are negatively impacted by alien species that benefit from human land uses and/or the accompanying increases in habitat disturbance (Saunders et al., 1991; Gurevitch & Padilla, 2004; Didham et al., 2007). The link between anthropogenic habitat distur- bance and invasion (Elton, 1958; Lozon & MacIsaac, 1997; D’Antonio et al., 1999) can result from a number of different underlying mechanisms, including the creation of new Published 2013. DOI: 10.1111/ddi.12027 This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ddi 749 Diversity and Distributions, (Diversity Distrib.) (2013) 19, 749–759 A Journal of Conservation Biogeography Diversity and Distributions