Search for: All records

Leaf litter arthropods are important components of the food web in forests, and their presence and diversity can provide information on forest health. There has been very little documentation of the leaf litter arthropods in Hawaiian forest ecosystems. This technical report is a photographic guide to some common arthropods collected from forest leaf litter at the Liko Nā Pilina Hybrid Ecosystems Project study site, a lowland wet forest in Hilo, Island of Hawaiʻi, USA. Leaf litter samples were collected from plots of invaded and experimental restoration communities using two complementary methods (litterbags and quadrats), and arthropods were extracted using Berlese funnels. The field site contained many morphospecies that were rare and locally distributed across plots, and only a few that were very common and widely distributed. The majority of the morphospecies identified were mites. This photoguide is designed to help identify arthropods found in plant litter in Hawaiian lowland forests and it may assist with research and education efforts concerned with the diversity, ecology, or conservation of litter arthropods across the Hawaiian archipelago and other Pacific islands. 

This data release includes metadata and tabular data that documents counts of arthropods collected from forest litter at the Liko Nā Pilina study site located on the Keaukaha Military Reservation, Hilo, Hawai‘i. These data are represented in three files: 1) a description of the date and location for each sample, 2) classification for all taxa, and 3) counts of each taxon in each sample. The classification file is in lieu of listing all taxa in the Taxonomic Classification section of the metadata files. Arthropods were extracted from litterbags containing leaves from dominant plant species within the study site and from litter collected in randomly placed quadrats. Samples were obtained after 1, 2, 4 and 6 months during 28 August 2019 - 28 January 2020. Samples were processed in the lab during 1 March 2020 - 31 December 2022, and taxa identified during 1 April - 31 December 2023. Quantitative data are only included for the litterbag samples. Overall, 319 arthropod taxa are included in this data release.