Ecological niche packing and spatial organisation of the urban park macrofauna comminity

Abstract

The results of studying of the spatial organization of the soil macrofauna of the urbanozem of the grassland were processed by OMI- and RLQ-analysis methods. The biogeocenotical situation at the location of an experimental polygon was shown to be typical of a meadow-steppe mega-mesotrophic xeromesophic character. The data for the research was collected by means of manual sorting of the soil samples with the area of 0.25×25 cm on a regular grid (7×15 samples) with the distance between the selection points 2 m (results presented as L-table), the measurement of temperature, electrical conductivity and soil penetration resistance, the litter depth and the height of the grass (R-table). The soil macrofauna of the experimental area was represented by 27 species with a total density of 56.38 ind./м2. The ecological structure of the ani-mal community of the soil was dominated by the pratants and silvants, mesophiles, olygotropic, endogeic topomorphs, saprophagous. Such edaphic characteristics as soil penetration resistance, electrical conductivity, litter depth, as well as height of grass, played an important role in structuring of ecological niche of macrofauna community. The first two axis of OMI analysis described 73.43% of inertia, which was sufficient for the description of the differentiation ecological niches of macrofauna on the investigated polygon to conduct in the space of the first two axes. For the average value of the marginality of the community (OMI = 2.90), the significance level was р = 0.001, which testifies to the important role of the selected environment variables for structuring of the soil macrofauna community. The four key functional groups of macrofauna were found as a result, the RLQ-analysis and the next cluster procedure and assessed the role of the edaphic factors in their spatial variation. Each of the functional groups was interpreted in terms of an ecomorphic approach.

Keywords

• soil macrofauna
• ecological niche
• spatial ecology
• ecomorphes