PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #89: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function III.
Presiding: R. Washington-Allen
Thursday, August 8. 1:00 PM to 3:45 PM. Coconino Meeting Room, TCC.
Biodiversity estimation and composition studies of leafhoppers (Homoptera: Cicadellidae) in neotropical rainforests .
Wallner, ADAM*,1, Dietrich, CHRIS2, Erwin, TERRY3, 1 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, URBANA, IL2 NATURAL HISTORY SURVERY, CHAMPAIGN, IL3 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON, DC, MD
ABSTRACT- Quantification of biodiversity in disappearing tropical rainforests is a necessity as well as a challenge. Estimating hyperdiverse groups of organisms, such as many insect taxa, is of special interest because it produces repeated patterns, which are the clues to ecological and evolutionary processes. However, speciose groups are very difficult to analyze because samples are not exhaustive and a large majority of specimens are composed of undescribed species. Thus, extrapolation algorithms are essential. The purpose of my study was to compare biodiversity of leafhopper (Homoptera: Cicadellidae) feeding guild species between two sites: Tambopata Reserve, Peru and Onkone Gare. Ecuador. Leafhoppers use piercing mouthparts to feed on plant sap. 3 feeding guilds represented by the subfamilies Cicadellinae (xylem feeders), Idiocerinae (phloem feeders), and Typhlocybinae (mesophyll feeders) were chosen to for the study. Canopy-fogging samples were loaned from the Smithsonian Institution and assorted into morphospecies. EstimateS was used to generate species accumulation curves of the leafhopper species between the sites. The analyses of Idiocerinae and Cicadellinae have been completed hitherto. Three points are made from the results 1) all species-accumulation curves failed to reach an asymptote, except Chao2 2) of the three Cicadellidae lineages, the most speciose group was Typhlocybinae followed by Idiocerinae then Cicadellinae, and 3) sites had low overlap in their species composition. Four points are made from these results 1) most species are rare 2) more sampling is required 3) all lineages had high numbers of singletons to doubletons in the samples, especially Idiocerniane and Typhlocybinae, and 4) complementarity between the sites was higher for Idiocerinae than Cicadellinae..
KEY WORDS: Leafhoppers, Biodiversity, Species-accumulation curves