Dispersal patterns of insects after a major disturbance event is applied to a disturbance gradient that conformed to the intermediate disturbance hypothesis in an urban ecosystem

Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.95v1
Subject Areas
Ecology
Keywords
Insects, Urban, Disturbance, Dispersal
Copyright
© 2013 Dhanayarajan et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Cite this article
Dhanayarajan T, Parsram M, Lo NNL. 2013. Dispersal patterns of insects after a major disturbance event is applied to a disturbance gradient that conformed to the intermediate disturbance hypothesis in an urban ecosystem. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e95v1

Abstract

Insects have been losing their habitats with the rapid expansion of many urban cities such as Toronto. This study aims at understanding the dispersal patterns insects take once they are placed under a heavy amount of disturbance. The use of power line corridors allows us to have a disturbance gradient within an urban city that allows us to observe the normal distribution of insects across the gradient and compare it to how their distribution patterns change once a disturbance has been applied. It is important in understanding insect dispersal patterns, because only then can we accurately create conservation strategies, and plan urban development to minimize the amount of damage done to insect populations. In this study, sweep nets, pan traps, and point counts were used to sample five areas of a disturbance gradient along a power line corridor. The experiment was conducted over three weeks and it was found that the gradient studied followed a quadratic distribution pattern predicted by the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, although with the application of disturbance, the insects diapered into an exponential type pattern in which the greatest abundance of insects were found in the area of least disturbance. The findings of this study have important implications in understanding the effects of disturbance on insects in urban ecosystems and are a step in the direction of forming a unified theory of insect/disturbance dynamics.

Author Comment

This is a future PeerJ submission. Our main concerns about this article is if we should just stick to focusing on how the distribution pattern of insects changes after disturbance and remove the information about how the IDH relates to our site, or if we should keep the paper as is. We are likely also going to change how we present the hypotheses. Instead of a null and alternate hypotheses, we are probably going to just use two alternate-type hypotheses; what are your opinions on this? We would greatly appreciate any comments on the paper. Thank you.