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Litter Arthropods of High Appalachia
The highest peaks of southern Appalachia are home to an endemic-rich fauna, including many litter- and soil-dwelling arthropod species that await discovery and description. This poorly-documented biodiversity, isolated in ancient spruce-fir forests and adapted to cooler montane habitats faces multiple threats, including global warming trends and ensuing competition from native and invasive species moving upward into these habitats.
We, along with our collaborator, Paul Marek, at Virginia Tech University were recently funded by NSF to conduct a comprehensive survey of litter-dwelling arthropods, those most threatened by changing environments due to generally low dispersal capabilities. The project's goals are to:
assess diversity at the highest points in the southern Appalachian Mountains,
establish a high throughput sequencing approach to efficiently document leaf litter arthropods,
assess the magnitude and geographic scale of endemism and cryptic species diversity, and
increase appreciation for the diversity and uniqueness of high elevation faunas, and highlight the urgency to protect them.
More details
We will conduct intensive fieldwork to sample the leaf-litter communities on more than 20 spruce-fir forest ‘sky-islands. Using a voucher-based metabarcoding workflow we will assemble complete molecular inventories of these communities, and compare their overall diversities and species compositions. The barcode sequences will also allow an assessment of the degree of species-level diversification among peaks. Preliminary data suggest that a significant degree of cryptic speciation has occurred across what appear to be widespread species.
Student projects within the larger project will focus on specific lineages to more carefully assess these questions of cryptic diversification and will utilize additional molecular markers, as well as morphology, to develop a fuller picture of the biogeographic histories of these restricted communities and their inhabitants.
Broader Impacts
In order to accomplish our goal of publicizing the diversity and potential threats to high Appalachian arthropod communities, we will undertake a number of activities aimed at various audiences. We plan to coordinate activities with our State and National Park Service partners for visitors, such as lectures, walks, and exhibits. We also plan to offer a summer workshop on arthropod identification, possibly at Highlands Biological Station.
We have recently started an iNaturalist page to aggregate observations of arthropods from some of the managed areas that host significant stands of spruce-fir forest: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/arthropods-of-high-appalachia.
Many of our recent catches can be seen on the project's growing Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/183480085@N02/
Some high Appalachian litter arthropods:
Protocols
As our project ramps up we will be documenting our protocols and sharing data through an Open Science Framework site: https://osf.io/h8xfe/
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