Abstract
Dung beetles have widely been accepted as cost-effective indicator taxa for biodiversity assessment; thus, standard protocols have been created to examine their species richness and diversity in many habitats. However, the vast majority of studies adopt short-term sampling protocols; few studies have quantified sampling efficiency at longer time scales or tested the efficacy of species richness estimates. Here we present long- and short-term sampling data from two regions of French Guiana: the Nouragues Tropical Forest Research Station and Kaw Mountain. We examine species richness and diversity, and use these data to make suggestions for future biodiversity assessments of dung beetles using dung baited pitfall transects. Species richness estimates based on short-term samples strongly underestimate the actual species richness by approximately 40 %. Duration of trapping was found to be more important than the number of traps and length of transects; by setting a second transect (4-day sample period) in the same habitat of Nouragues, thereby increasing the sample duration, the number of species increased by 14 %.
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Acknowledgements
The short-term sampling for this research would not have been possible without the funding and encouraging support provided by Michael L. May. He has been an advisor, mentor and friend, and he is a genuinely nice person. Collections in 2005 were also part of a Smithsonian Institute expedition to sample the ants of French Guiana in collaboration with Ted Schultz and John LaPolla. We thank Trond Larsen for his review and comments on this manuscript. We also thank Sacha Spector and Bruce Gill for their time with identification of specimens.
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This is a contribution to the Festschrift for Michael L. May
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Price, D.L., Feer, F. Are there pitfalls to pitfalls? Dung beetle sampling in French Guiana. Org Divers Evol 12, 325–331 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-012-0106-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-012-0106-2