Influence of Enviroment of Forest-Steppe Ecotone on Soil Arthropods Community in Northern Hebei,China

Abstract

Abstract It was investigated on Soil arthropod communities in the forest-steppe ecotone in northern Hebei province to provide basic information on environment changes, which could promote the development of soil arthropod communities and be useful for the biodiversity conservation in the ecotone. From the preliminary identification, a total of 7994 individual soil arthropods were collected, which belonged to 25 groups, 6 classes and 24 orders. Acarina , Hymenoptera and Collembola were the dominant groups in the ecotone. The increased abundance of rare groups in the Forest zone with the richer vegetation, higher arthropod abundance and more substantial litter depth, could be interpreted as a reaction to the suitable soil environment and food supply. And these rare groups were sensitive to environmental changes, which could be regarded as biotic indicators for evaluating soil quality. The analysis of community diversity showed that every index was decreased from Forest zone to Forest-steppe zone and then to Meadow-steppe zone. These results indicated that the ecotone zone has abundant species, complicated community structrure and shows the typical characteristics of the ecotone.