Sensitivity of different taxonomic levels of soil Gamasina to land use and anthropogenic disturbances.

BEDANO J.C.; RUF, A.

AGRICULTURAL AND FOREST ENTOMOLOGY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Año: 2010 vol. 12 p. 203 - 212

1461-9555

Abstract 1 The effect of taxonomic level on the sensitivity of bioindicators has been widelyinvestigated in aquatic ecosystems and, to a lesser extent, in terrestrial ecosystems.However, no studies have been conducted on the sensitivity of the differenttaxonomic levels of soil mites, especially Gamasina, to human activities.2 The present study aimed to assess the sensitivity of different taxonomic levels ofsoil Gamasina mites to anthropogenic disturbances in Europe and Argentina. Wearranged the data from previous projects in a hierarchical system and conducted astudy to identify the critical taxonomical levels that had the highest discriminativepotential between sites (Europe and Argentina) or management types (forests,grasslands, fallows, succession, recultivation and agricultural sites).3 For the Gamasina community, geographical location was by far more important thanthe influence of any land use type. The analysis including only the European sitesdemonstrated that communities belonging to sites subjected to different land useswere also significantly different.4 The species data set provided a clearer separation of sites according to both thegeographical and the land-use gradients than the genus and family data sets. Thegenus and, to a lesser extent, the family approach may be sufficient to elucidatethe influence of great geographical differences and also of certain land uses (e.g.grasslands from the forests and arable sites).5 Species presence/absence data provided valuable information in our analyses,although the use of quantitative data yielded a clearer separation of sites.