Biodiversity baseline of the French Guiana spider fauna

Abstract

The need for an updated list of spiders found in French Guiana rose recently due to many upcoming studies planned. In this paper, we list spiders from French Guiana from existing literature (with corrected nomenclature when necessary) and from 2142 spiders sampled in 12 sites for this baseline study. Three hundred and sixty four validated species names of spider were found in the literature and previous authors' works. Additional sampling, conducted for this study added another 89 identified species and 62 other species with only a genus name for now. The total species of spiders sampled in French Guiana is currently 515. Many other Morphospecies were found but not described as species yet. An accumulation curve was drawn with seven of the sampling sites and shows no plateau yet. Therefore, the number of species inhabiting French Guiana cannot yet be determined. As the very large number of singletons found in the collected materials suggests, the accumulation curve indicates nevertheless that more sampling is necessary to discover the many unknown spider species living in French Guiana, with a focus on specific periods (dry season and wet season) and on specific and poorly studied habitats such as canopy, inselberg and cambrouze (local bamboo monospecific forest). © 2013 Vedel et al.