Abstract
Allocosa brasiliensis is a sand-dwelling wolf spider considered a good bioindicator to evaluate the quality of coastal dune ecosystems from Uruguay. Habitat fragmentation and human activities have impacted and reduced the Southern Uruguayan coast during the last decades. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the density, surface activity and habitat preference of A. brasiliensis in beaches with different human impact. For that purpose, we sampled during the night with head lamps and applied the capture-mark-recapture method. Females were more abundant than males and were the most recaptured sex. The most fragmented beaches showed lower number of burrows and individuals, especially in immatures stages. We found that the most suitable sandy habitat for A. brasiliensis should present a vegetation cover optimum of 25% - 50% of the surface. This study could provide tools for the implementation of future management conservation plans of the Southern Uruguayan coastline.
Highlights
Biodiversity loss as a consequence of human activity is one of the topics of environmental sciences that has focused more attention in the last two decades [1]
This study revealed that A. brasiliensis presents higher values of abundance and density in less reduced and fragmented beaches with more availability of open dunes as site B (Table 1 and Table 2)
Our results indicate that A. brasiliensis is very sensitive to changes in the vegetation cover of the sand
Summary
Biodiversity loss as a consequence of human activity is one of the topics of environmental sciences that has focused more attention in the last two decades [1]. Habitat fragmentation negatively affects species communities in ecosystems, leading to the reduction of its natural areas, the isolation of their populations, increasing of edge effect, and causing a trend towards species extinction [7]. A quarter of the world’s population lives in coastal areas [5] [8]. This phenomenon, along with the impacts of changes in land use, results in the alteration of coastal ecosystems in many parts of the planet, causing fragmentation and reduction of the natural environments [5] [9] [10]. Coastal areas generally are characterized by narrow shore parallel bands that comprise species assemblages specially adapted to live in changeable climatic conditions and environmental constraints such as strong winds, sand movements, high evaporation, high salinity, and limited nutrients [11] [12]
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