Com influeix la qualitat florística dels prats seminaturals en la diversitat d’artròpodes

Abstract

Nowadays, the conservation of natural areas is a major issue in our society, but most of efforts and resources are focused on the most important ecosystems such as great forests and coral reefs because they are places of high biodiversity and where habitat destruction is very high. But there are also other ecosystems like seminatural grasslands presenting great biodiversity, but currently we did not known a lot about their ecology and how animal communities respond to the degradation of the vegetation. The study was carried out in the Parc Natural Zona Volcànica de la Garrotxa (PNZVG) which contains 2.5% of natural grasslands, with the aim of testing the influence of the floristic quality of the meadows on the diversity of arthropods to know how manage this systems. The identification of the arthropods was carried out at morphospecies level due to the high complexity of reaching the level of species. The results show that the main epigea arthropods orders in the PNZVG are Aranea, Coleoptera, Hemiptera and Hymenoptera. Comparing the arthropods at the level of order according to the temporality of the trail, the floristic quality of the meadow and the different grasslands studied, we observed significant differences between the diversity of orders and the floristic state of the meadows, being the meadows in worst conditions above the meadows in good condition, which is opposed to the initial hypotheses in the grasslands with better state we expected more diversity. At the level of morphospecies we found no significant differences in most cases, we only could demonstrate that the different fields studied differed significantly among themselves regarding abundance, diversity and richness. However, selecting only the four major orders morphospecies we found that in addition to the differences between the meadows, there are significant differences between the temporality and abundance of arthropods between 9 and 23 July to 6 August due to changes in rainfall and temperature caused a decrease in the activity of arthropods. We should continue with the monitoring of the arthropod community to better understanding of its dynamics and how varies this comunity depending on the floristic quality of seminatural grasslands.