Assessing the Relationship Between Vegetation Structure and Harvestmen Assemblage in an Amazonian Upland Forest

1. Arthropod diversity and non-flying arthropod food web are strongly influenced by habitat components related to plant architecture and habitat structural complexity. However, we still poorly understand the relationship between arthropod diversity and the vegetation structure at different spatial scales. Here, we examined how harvestmen assemblages are distributed across six local scale habitats (trees, dead trunks, palms, bushes, herbs and litter), and along three proxies of vegetation structure (number of palms, number of trees and litter depth) at mesoscale.\n\n2. We collected harvestmen using cryptic manual search in 30 permanent plots of 250 m at Reserva Ducke, Amazonas, Brazil. The 30 plots cover approximately 25 km2 of upland forests. At a local scale, harvestmen were most diverse and abundant on trees. The likely preference of trees by harvestmen may be related to the variety of local microhabitats offered by large trees. However, despite the strong link between number of harvestman species and individuals with large trees, only harvestmen assemblages composition were related with number of trees and with number of palms, at mesoscale.\n\n3. Harvestman richness and abundance were not related with any vegetation structure predictor at mesoscale. Therefore, areas of upland forest in the central Amazon with large trees and palms do not harbor more harvestman species nor individuals, but are suitable to maintain different harvestmen assemblages.