Can mixture of flowering plants within intensive agricultural landscape positively affect ground-dwelling spider assemblages?

Abstract

Spiders are dominant predators in agroecosystems. Terrestrial semi-natural habitats, such as different field margins, can enhance the abundance and diversity of spiders in adjoining fields. We compared the effect of a mixture of flowering plants and an adjacent maize crop for ground-dwelling spiders (Arachnida: Araneae). It was assumed that occurrence of these beneficial arthropods will benefit from the adjacent strip of mixed plants. They were collected by using pitfall traps in a two-year study carried out in Poland during whole growing seasons. The species similarity between the two studied treatments was low, which was indicated with the redundancy analysis (RDA). Furthermore, the species richness and overall abundance of spiders were significantly higher in the mixture of flowering plants than in the adjacent maize field, therefore we assumed that this kind of habitat diversification might increase their role in biological pest control.