Multivariate Analysis of Spider Diversity in Agricultural, Horticultural and Silvicultural Ecosystems and their Relation to Subtropical Climatic Conditions

Abstract

Spiders are the Arthropod and belong to the Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Arachnida, Order: Araneae. Spiders totally depend on predation of small insects and other animals and have important role in the structure of communities and food webs both as an individual numbers and as an energy consumer.. Hence, documentation of spiders gives information about biodiversity of ecosystem in a particular geographical area. Totally arthropods belonged to 14 orders and 85 Nos. of different families. To study the similarity between two groups in species, family and ordinal level is used Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Correspondence Analysis (CA) were evaluated to understand the arthropod population dynamics and habitat specific occurrence of spiders in different ecosystem Viz., Silvicultural, Horticultural and Agricultural ecosystem. To correlate the weather parameters with spider population we used Pearson correlation, regression line, Redundancy Analysis (RDA) and Canonical Coefficient Analysis (CCA). Correlation analysis showed arthropod population positively correlated to maximum and minimum temperature and evening relative humidity and negatively correlated to morning relative humidity and rainfall. The eigenvectors at generic level was found maximum in horticultural ecosystem (0.591) followed by silvicultural (0.581), maize (0.407), rice (0.329) and potato ecosystem (0.183) in factor (F1). The asymmetric CA row and column plot in generic level suggested that the genus Tylorida,, potato and horticultural ecosystems respectively. In case of weather perimeter with relation to arthropod population RDA showed that Arachnids families viz., Lycosidae, Thomisidae, Theridiidae, Tetraganthidae etc are closely associated with maximum temperature in silvicultural and horticultural ecosystems.