Abstract
The aim of our study was to assess the changes in ground-dwelling arthropod communities structure in wheat, potatoes and lucerne crops, with and without pesticides application. We estimated the impact of chemical control on species richness and propose several indicators for biodiversity assessment. The significant differences between agrosystem structure in control and pesticide-treated crops indicated that aboveground arthropod diversity can be used as an indicator of biological diversity reduction assessment. The best estimator indices for human induced impacts are taxa richness, the ratio between species richness and the number of individuals in control and pesticide treated samples, the changes in the ratio between primary–secondary consumers, and the proportion of spiders (Aranea). The use of diversity indices in impact assessment was misleading or inconclusive in some cases. Only the Shannon-Wiener index appears to perform relatively well, but sample sizes must be first equalized through rarefaction.
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