Impact of deforestation on earthworm populations in Guyana's rainforests
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Environmental Impacts, Population Biology
- Keywords
- deforestation, population ecology, rainforest ecosystem, earthworm, pedological environment
- Copyright
- © 2019 Persaud
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Impact of deforestation on earthworm populations in Guyana's rainforests. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27841v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27841v1
Abstract
Changes to the landscape of tropical rainforests are potential instigators in population changes experienced by earthworms, which are integral biological components of almost all terrestrial ecosystems. A comparative analysis of earthworm populations was done in the rainforests of Guyana to investigate the impact of deforestation on earthworm populations. Earthworms were sampled in pristine forest sites and deforested sites, which yielded 31 species belonging to 10 families. Deforested sites suffered significantly from low abundance, density, diversity and richness. The population data among the two types of sites were all of statistical significant difference, with the exception of epigeic abundance. Earthworm abundance and richness were found to be significantly negatively correlated to deforestation. Anecic ecotype were the most affected as none were recorded in deforested sites while P. corethrurus was found to be the most abundant species in the deforested sites.
Author Comment
Deforestation was found to have significant adverse effects on earthworm populations, decreasing abundance, density, richness and diversity while drastically altering ecotype diversity and species dominance.