Nuria Astrid Perez VarelaResearch AbstractSan Bernardino Valley College11/16/2012

Where Do You Prefer to Live? A Comparison of Arthropod’s Micro-communities of San Bernardino National Forest

Proposal description

Option 1The frequencies of species' occurrence, composition, and richness of the arthropod's

micro-communities inhabiting the riparian and chaparral ecosystems in Mill Creek Canyon were evaluated and compared.

Option 2How a community of plants can define not only the terrestrial environment of a region

but also the richness of the community of arthropods inhabiting in it.

Abstract

The community of plants has a strong effect in the terrestrial environment of a region and in the lives of all organisms inhabiting in it (Sadava et al. 2011). Each species' population has a particular habitat requirements and tolerance (Pianka 1999), therefore, it is most likely to find different species in areas under distinct environmental conditions because the different adaptative and acclimation abilities of each species.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate if there is a difference between the frequencies of the arthropod species that inhabit the riparian and the chaparral ecosystems and to estimate the change in species composition between the two arthropod communities found in the two habitats in the same canyon where no geographical barrier divides them.

The arthropods, collected with the use of pit-traps, were morphologically classified and the frequency of occurrence of each species was counted and analyzed with a Chi square analysis. The richness of the two arthropod communities' diversity were compared using the Sorenson's index that measures beta diversity, which estimates the change in species composition from one community to another and the significance of the species shared between the two.

As the preservation of a plant community and different biomes is being a hot topic in our society, the preservation of the arthropod communities should be also taken under account because the arthropods found in the leaf litter are highly important for the stability of the different biomes. They decompose death material into nutrients used for plant's metabolism and they are source of energy for larger animal species. Where arthropods prefer to live has an effect on the other species' communities of that region.

Work cited

Pianka E. 1999. Evolutionary Ecology 6th edition. Addison Wesley Longman. 61 p. Print

Sadava et al. 2011. Life: The Science of Biology 9th edition. Freeman. 54 p. 1211p. Print.