“Collembola of the Western Taimyr:” Forty years later

Abstract

A quantitative study of Collembola was carried out in 2010 in the area of the former Tareya Field Station of the Komarov Botanical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, situated on the Taimyr Peninsula within the central part of the typical tundra subzone. The present-day collembolan assemblages were compared with those revealed 40 years ago, based on the results of a study performed in the region during the International Biological Program. Despite the absence of notable changes in the flora and vegetation, collembolan assemblages of all the plant associations studied in 2010 were clearly different from the complexes that had existed in the same territory at the end of the 1960s. Nevertheless, both the local collembolan fauna and the studied collembolan assemblages did not become more similar to their southern analogues and still fit well the characteristics typical of the region’s zonal position.