Hidden diversity in forest soils: Characterization and comparison of terrestrial flatworm's communities in two national parks in Spain

Ecology and Evolution
Marta Álvarez-PresasMarta Riutort

Abstract

Terrestrial flatworms (Platyhelminthes, Tricladida, and Geoplanidae) belong to what is known as cryptic soil fauna of humid forests and are animals not easily found or captured in traps. Nonetheless, they have been demonstrated to be good indicators of the conservation status of their habitat as well as a good model to reconstruct the recent and old events affecting biodiversity. This is mainly due to their delicate constitution, their dependence on the integrity of their habitat, and their very low dispersal capacity. At present, little is known about their communities, except for some studies performed in Brazil. In this work, we analyze for the first time in Europe terrestrial flatworm communities. We have selected two protected areas belonging to the Red Española de Parques Nacionales. Our aims include performing a first study of the species richness and community structure for European terrestrial planarian species at regional and local scale. We evaluate the effect of type of forests in the community composition and flatworms' abundance, but also have into account the phylogenetic framework (never considered in previous studies) analyzed based on molecular data. We find differences in the species composition among parks, ...Continue Reading

References

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Sep 14, 2007·Molecular Ecology·P B EidesenC Brochmann
Jan 5, 2008·Conservation Biology : the Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology·Miguel B AraújoJuan C Moreno
Mar 25, 2008·Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution·Marta Alvarez-PresasMarta Riutort
Feb 24, 2012·Systematic Biology·Fredrik RonquistJohn P Huelsenbeck
Aug 1, 2012·Nature Methods·Diego DarribaDavid Posada
Jan 19, 2013·Molecular Biology and Evolution·Kazutaka Katoh, Daron M Standley
Apr 12, 2014·PLoS Computational Biology·Remco BouckaertAlexei J Drummond
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Methods Mentioned

BETA
PCR

Software Mentioned

MOTUS
R Vegan package
BioEdit
DAMBE6
Geneious
Biomatters
ANOSIM
R language package
jModelTest
GBlocks

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