Balancing sampling effort and representativeness for assessing species composition of Enchytraeidae in different habitats
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25674/514Keywords:
soil fauna, rarefaction, singletons, seasonal variation, edaphobase data warehouseAbstract
Soil biodiversity has gained increased attention in science as well as policy during the last years, and programs for monitoring soil animal biodiversity have been approved. Enchytraeidae are often part of these programs, however, their identification to species level is time consuming and experts are rare. Probably, reducing the number of samples taken can increase efficiency of investigating enchytraeid communities, thereby reducing effort not only for morphological identification by taxon experts but also possibly for molecular approaches. However, the trade-off between effort and quality of the received data needs to be addressed carefully. To test the potential for reduction in sample number without losing important information, we used an existing high-effort dataset of enchytraeid communities from German grasslands, forests, and arable fields. We applied species rarefaction and estimates of expected biodiversity given the existing dataset to find out if the number of soil cores taken, or the number of sampling events, can safely be reduced without losing important information on indicator species. Our results show that, while missing out only very sporadic species, sampling effort can be reduced from the initial 20 soil cores by 55 % in coniferous forests, 45 % in broadleaved forests, 40 % in grasslands, and 30 % in arable fields. Despite the fact that species accumulation curves were not significantly affected, a reduction of sampling frequency from two (spring and fall) to only one (either spring or fall) resulted in the consistent reduction of the number of indicator species across different habitats. If sampling effort needs to be restricted, we therefore recommend a reduction in total number of soil cores rather than a reduction of sampling times.
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