Although arthropods are the largest component of animal diversity, they are traditionally underrepresented in biological inventories and monitoring programmes. However, no biodiversity assessment can be considered informative without including them. Arthropod immature stages are often discarded during sorting, despite frequently representing more than half of the collected individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpiders are a highly diversified group of arthropods and play an important role in terrestrial ecosystems as ubiquitous predators, which makes them a suitable group to test a variety of eco-evolutionary hypotheses. For this purpose, knowledge of a diverse range of species traits is required. Until now, data on spider traits have been scattered across thousands of publications produced for over two centuries and written in diverse languages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWater quality and riparian communities are among the most affected stream components by agriculture. However, little is known about the effects of riparian management for both aquatic and terrestrial taxa at different spatial scales. Here, we surveyed aquatic (diatoms) and terrestrial taxa (bryophytes, vascular plants, litter-dwelling snails, and ground and volant arthropods), to compare the abundance and richness of riparian taxa and chemical quality between reference and exposed sites in two stream reaches each of c.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is an increasing demand for databases including species trait information for biodiversity and community ecology studies. The existence of trait databases is useful for comparative studies within taxa or geographical regions, but there is low availability of databases for certain organisms. Here we present an open access functional trait database for spiders from Macaronesia and the Iberian Peninsula, recording several morphological and ecological traits related to the species life histories, microhabitat and trophic preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A large scale semi-quantitative biodiversity assessment was conducted in white oak woodlands in areas included in the Spanish Network of National Parks, as part of a project aimed at revealing biogeographic patterns and identify biodiversity drivers. The semi-quantitative COBRA sampling protocol was conducted in sixteen 1-ha plots across six national parks using a nested design. All adult specimens were identified to species level based on morphology.
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