Abstract
BackgroundBy the end of this century, the potential climate-biome of the southern Kenai Peninsula is forecasted to change from transitional boreal forest to prairie and grasslands, a scenario that may already be playing out in the Caribou Hills region. Here, spruce (Picea × lutzii Little [glauca × sitchensis]) forests were heavily thinned by an outbreak of the spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis (Kirby, 1837)) and replaced by the native but invasive grass species, Calamagrostis canadensis (Michx.) P. Beauv. As part of a project designed to delimit and characterize potentially expanding grasslands in this region, we sought to characterize the arthropod and earthworm communities of these grasslands.We also used this sampling effort as a trial of applying high-throughput sequencing metabarcoding methods to a real-world inventory of terrestrial arthropods.New informationWe documented 131 occurrences of 67 native arthropod species at ten sites, characterizing the arthropod fauna of these grasslands as being dominated by Hemiptera (60% of total reads) and Diptera (38% of total reads). We found a single exotic earthworm species, Dendrobaena octaedra (Savigny, 1826), at 30% of sites and one unidentified enchytraeid at a single site. The utility of high-throughput sequencing metabarcoding as a tool for bioassessment of terrestrial arthropod assemblages was confirmed.
Highlights
BackgroundBy the end of this century, the potential climate-biome of the southern Kenai Peninsula is forecasted to change from transitional boreal forest to prairie and grasslands, a scenario that may already be playing out in the Caribou Hills region
By the end of this century, the potential climate-biome of the southern Kenai Peninsula is forecasted to change from transitional boreal forest to prairie and grasslands (Scenarios Network for Arctic Planning and EWHALE lab 2012)
This may be happening presently in the Caribous Hills region on the southern Kenai Peninsula between Tustumena Lake and Kachemak Bay, where Lutz spruce (Picea × lutzii Little [glauca × sitchensis]) forests were heavily thinned by a massive outbreak of the spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis (Kirby, 1837)) in the 1990s (Berg et al 2006, Boucher and Mead 2006, Sherriff et al 2011)
Summary
By the end of this century, the potential climate-biome of the southern Kenai Peninsula is forecasted to change from transitional boreal forest to prairie and grasslands, a scenario that may already be playing out in the Caribou Hills region. As part of a project designed to delimit and characterize potentially expanding grasslands in this region, we sought to characterize the arthropod and earthworm communities of these grasslands. We used this sampling effort as a trial of applying high-throughput sequencing metabarcoding methods to a real-world inventory of terrestrial arthropods. We documented 131 occurrences of 67 native arthropod species at ten sites, characterizing the arthropod fauna of these grasslands as being dominated by Hemiptera (60% of total reads) and Diptera (38% of total reads). The utility of high-throughput sequencing metabarcoding as a tool for bioassessment of terrestrial arthropod assemblages was confirmed
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