The Canadian prairies are a diverse landscape containing large areas of agroecosystems and grasslands. Often within these landscapes are prairie potholes: ephemeral wetlands formed from the scouring action of the Pleistocene glaciation. Prairie potholes provide important habitat for waterfowl, and their margins have been thought to play an important roll in arthropod biodiversity. Monitoring the quality and biodiversity within these landscapes is crucial to characterizing overall ecosystem health and function. Ground dwelling arthropods provide a valuable tool to do so, due to their ease of collection and importance to contributed ecosystem services. The goal of this study was to understand the distribution of ground dwelling arthropods across key features of the prairies: prairie pothole edges, agricultural fields, and grasslands. Three pitfall traps were set up along two 150m transects in the summers of 2018 and 2019, one from a water feature within the landscape and the other from the landscape's boundary. Sites sampled included five of each canola, barley, wheat, and grassland, with collected specimens being identified to family. Data was analyzed using a Hellinger transformation for a PERMANOVA and redundancy analysis (RDA). Richness, Pileou's evenness, and the Shannon Index were also calculated for the dataset.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results indicate that arthropod community distribution varies between site identity (R2 = 0.15, p< 0.001), but not field margin identity (R2 = 0.02, p=.112). Community metrics indicate that grassland sites have the highest richness (richness = 93, H’ =2.58, J=0.47), while Barley sites have the lowest (richness = 24, H’=2.14, J=0.67). Canola (richness = 54, H’=1.80, J=0.54) and wheat (richness = 47, H’=2.15, J=0.56) sites were shown to be comparable in terms of richness. Overall, we conclude that field identity influences ground dwelling arthropod distribution, while prairie pothole margins do not.
