PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 6: Biodiversity: Management, Theory, and Techniques
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 516 D, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Developing efficient biodiversity assessment tools using a structured arthropod and floral inventory of hardwood and hemlock forests.

Rohr, Jason^*,1, Kim, Ke Chung¹, ¹ Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA

ABSTRACT- Assessing the diversity of hyperdiverse taxa, such as terrestrial arthropods, demands efficient inventory methods. A handful of studies have developed methods to efficiently survey terrestrial arthropods in the tropics, but we lack efficient sampling protocols for terrestrial arthropods in the less diverse, and thus more manageable, temperate regions of the United States. Consequently, we conducted a structured, all arthropod and floral inventory of mixed hardwood and hemlock forests of Shenandoah National Park, VA, USA to 1) compare the biodiversity of these habitats and 2) identify efficiency improvements for regional biodiversity assessment. Arthropods were quantified using 11 sampling methods and arthropods and flora were measured at the forest floor, understory, and canopy. Abundance, sample-based interpolated richness and evenness, and predicted asymptotic richness were greater in hardwood than hemlock forest in all strata for arthropods and vegetation, with the exception of arthropod evenness being similar in these habitats. Ordination-based complementarity analyses revealed that hardwood forest had most of the taxa in hemlock forest and more, suggesting that little would be gained stratifying sampling methods across forests to assess or diversity. Strong positive correlations were discovered between the expected true richness of arthropods and flora, the family richness of both Coleoptera and Hymenoptera and the richness of all other arthropods, and the family richness of major arthropod orders and their number of genera, species, and morphospecies. These results indicate that the richness of flora, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, and higher taxonomic ranks represent potentially strong surrogates for the arthropod diversity of these forests. Finally, we used rarefaction curves to identify combinations of collecting methods that most efficiently sampled arthropods in each forest strata and employed ordination techniques to match collecting methods with the arthropod taxa they best targeted. We expect these efficiency enhancements to facilitate managing and understanding the forest biodiversity of eastern North America.

Key words: biodiversity, inventory efficiency, terrestrial arthropods, forest vegetation