New Litter Trap Devices Outperform Pitfall Traps for Studying Arthropod Activity.

ABSTRACT: Soil fauna play a key role in nutrient cycling and decomposition, and in recent years, researchers have become more and more interested in this compartment of terrestrial ecosystems. In addition, soil fauna can act as ecosystem engineers by creating, modifying, and maintaining the habitat for other organisms. Ecologists usually utilize live catches in pitfalls traps as a standard method to study the activity of epigeic fauna in addition to relative abundance. Counts in pitfall traps can be used as estimates of relative activity to compare among experimental treatments. This requires taking independent estimates of abundance (e.g., by sifting soil litter, mark-recapture), which can then be used as covariates in linear models to compare the levels of fauna activity (trap catches) among treat

SUBMITTER: Ruiz-Lupion D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6571813 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature