Soil macrofauna of submediterranean ecosystems in the Abrau Peninsula, the Northwestern Caucasus

Abstract

Submediterranean landscapes identified by geographers and botanists as a unique formation in the narrow coastal zone can also be distinguished according to soil-zoological characteristics. The fauna of large soil invertebrates has been studied in different forest types and open woodland of the Abrau Peninsula in July 2001. The results show that the distance from the sea plays the most important role in the formation of the soil macrofauna: its parameters in beech and hornbeam forests differ significantly from each other and from those in the coastal biotopes, in which the soil macrofauna is characterized by low abundance and contains a large proportion of xerophilic groups of invertebrates. The relict Haploembia solieri included in the Red Data Book can serve as an indicator species for this type of landscapes. Differences between the results of this study and the data obtained by Arnol’di and Gilyarov in 1958 are probably accounted for by geographic and seasonal factors rather than by anthropogenic transformation of the submediterranean ecosystems in the late 1950s.