Monitoring wildlife habitats has become important to forest ecosystem
management because it provides valuable information about the response of forests
and their species to harvest practices, impacts from recreational use, conservation
efforts, and natural and human-caused disturbances. Monitoring is a complex task
that requires a variety of abiotic and biotic measurements and decisions about what
should be measured, and when and where measurements should be taken. Riparian
habitats contain unusually high diversity and are important to land managers.
Wildlife assessments of riparian areas have focused on vertebrate species such as
amphibians, birds, and mammals, but have largely ignored the arthropod
components of the habitats. Arthropods constitute over 85% of all species and
posses characteristics that make them valuable for tracking environmental changes.
The purpose of this study was to gather site-specific data about epigaeic, riparian
beetle community composition of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (HJA).
The patterns of beetle distribution, abundance, and diversity were analyzed and the
results were used to characterize and compare the riparian and adjacent upslope
beetle communities. Almost 8,000 beetle specimens representing about 250
species were collected from 141 pitfall traps placed along 10 transects in 3 different
channel morphologies along Lookout Creek in the HJA. Traps were opened during
six 30-day sampling periods over 2 years. Riparian and adjacent upslope beetle
communities had high diversity measurements. The average difference of the
calculated Simpson's Diversity Index between the two communities was 0.0116
and represented about 1% of the average riparian diversity. Analysis of species-curves
indicated that the riparian habitats contained a higher total number of
species. Multivariate Principal Coordinate Analysis indicated that the two habitats
had distinctly different beetle communities. Multigroup Discriminant Analysis
correctly classified 89.7% of the sampling units as the habitat group into which
they were assigned a priori. Detailed recommendations for monitoring riparian
habitats were discussed. / Graduation date: 2000
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33339 |
| Date | 15 February 2000 |
| Creators | Brenner, Gregory John |
| Contributors | Lattin, John D. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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