Biodiversity Inventory Website Protocol
This protocol objective is to make inventory web sites like the ones presented here automatically. It standardizes the acquisition of digital images to directly create web pages. BIOINV_2.2.zip is not longer available, a better version PYOINV 1.0 can be downloaded here. Thanks for your patience.
Our biodiversity inventory pages can be searched individually by Inventory or compared through the Comparative Search menu. The selected search option will appear in a new window. The Microscopy methods page describes the techniques used to take these images.
In any search mode select a Family to show the species included. To enter any species pages just click on its name. Comparative Search is organized by Inventory and Families are look up by scrolling down the respective inventory menu. Click in the thumbnails to access the high resolution images that will pop-up on separate resizable windows. This was done with the purpose of comparing images side by side after organizing them on the screen.
Please send your comments and species identifications to: fap@ciencias.unam.mx
Álvarez-Padilla F. Galán-Sánchez MA. and Salgueiro-Sepúlveda, FJ. 2020. A protocol for documenting spider biodiversity inventories with websites applied to a Mexican Tropical Wet Forest (Araneae: Araneomorphae). Zootaxa. 4722 (3): 241-269.
Measuring spider diversity
Collecting all spider species in a relatively large area is impossible, therefore extrapolations and statistical tools are needed to give accuracy to the community parameters analyzed. Applying standardized collecting protocols is crucial to achieve this and to compare communities between places. Over many years most Arachnologists have used the same collecting protocol with some minor variations. At its core it makes explicit the collecting effort (1 hour/person/method) for direct techniques and samples one hectare or area.
Please follow these two simple rules and your spider species inventory will be more cited and compared with similar studies.
- Make explicit the units of effort, for Araneomorphae 1 hour/person/method is the standard. This time can be expanded depending on the rarity of the spiders or their abundance in the ecosystem sampled.
- Use areas equal or greater than 2,500 m² (plots of 50 X 50 meters) this will make better species / area extrapolations. Transects are NOT recommended to use because hundreds would be needed to cover a comparable area.
Tracing a plot with simple tools
A sampling plot of any area can be traced with a compass, a long measuring tape and two people. Set a given orientation in the compass lets say NE. Trace an imaginary line in the compass from 225° to 45° and project it to a land mark where the other person must place the measuring tape in a straight line. For the corners add 90° keeping track the turn orientation to close the square. For this example the other three directions would be 135° to 315°, 45° to 225°, and 315° to 135°. For irregular polygons the job is done with a ruler, a notebook and some knowledge of basic geometry.