Biodiversity baseline of the French Guiana spider fauna

Vincent Vedel,Antonio Domingos Brescovit,Jérôme Murienne,Christina Rheims

doi:10.1186/2193-1801-2-361

Abstract

The need for an updated list of spiders found in French Guiana rose recently due to many upcoming studies planned. In this paper, we list spiders from French Guiana from existing literature (with corrected nomenclature when necessary) and from 2142 spiders sampled in 12 sites for this baseline study. Three hundred and sixty four validated species names of spider were found in the literature and previous authors’ works. Additional sampling, conducted for this study added another 89 identified species and 62 other species with only a genus name for now. The total species of spiders sampled in French Guiana is currently 515. Many other Morphospecies were found but not described as species yet. An accumulation curve was drawn with seven of the sampling sites and shows no plateau yet. Therefore, the number of species inhabiting French Guiana cannot yet be determined. As the very large number of singletons found in the collected materials suggests, the accumulation curve indicates nevertheless that more sampling is necessary to discover the many unknown spider species living in French Guiana, with a focus on specific periods (dry season and wet season) and on specific and poorly studied habitats such as canopy, inselberg and cambrouze (local bamboo monospecific forest).

Highlights

Under the Streamline European Biodiversity Inventory 2010 protocols (SEBI) (Butchardt et al 2010; Jones et al 2011), species occurrences and abundances are currently only being assessed through survey of birds and butterflies
French Guiana is 97% covered by primary forest and hosts an exceptionally diverse and distinctive equatorial forest, part of the Amazonian tropical rainforest
The minimum richness is evaluated at 1241 species by the Chao 1 estimator and the Jackknife estimator calculated 1680 (+/−112) species. These results suggest we only know about one third (515 species identified out of around 1,500 species estimated) of the local spider fauna, which places French Guiana as a region of high diversity of spiders and in a region where sampling and identification efforts have to be substantially increased to gain a sufficient knowledge in order to be able to use spider as a biodiversity assessment tool

Summary

Introduction

Under the Streamline European Biodiversity Inventory 2010 protocols (SEBI) (Butchardt et al 2010; Jones et al 2011), species occurrences and abundances are currently only being assessed through survey of birds and butterflies. Rigorous sampling protocols have just been set up (Cardoso 2009) and locally adapted (Vedel and Lalagüe 2013) They provide a complementary alternative to Lepidoptera in term of distribution and ecological functions as top predators of soil and lower vegetation communities (Cardoso et al 2008) and are extremely diverse in tropical rain forest (Sørensen et al 2002; Pinkus-Rendón et al 2006; Coddington et al 2009). French Guiana is 97% covered by primary forest and hosts an exceptionally diverse and distinctive equatorial forest, part of the Amazonian tropical rainforest. This region has an increasing demographic and economic development, which will raise conservation issues in the near future. Our goal is to establish a baseline biodiversity reference for the spider fauna of French Guiana to enable further studies which will set spider monitoring as an efficient “tool” for assessment and monitoring local biodiversity

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Conclusion