| Ecosystem restoration efforts that emulate natural disturbance processes and the legacies provided by these disturbances are thought to be the most successful, but without a clear understanding of how ecosystems regenerate after these disturbances we do not have a good framework to design effective restoration practices or the information to evaluate the success of these restoration efforts. In order to obtain more holistic views of ecological restoration there needs to be an integration of plant and animal metrics utilized to evaluate success of practices. I advocate that spiders are a good choice of indicator organism to bridge this gap.;My research focused specifically on the spider community response to a variety of disturbances, ranging from natural---stand replacing fires in jack pine stands of northern Lower Michigan and catastrophic wind disturbance in mixed-hardwood forests of northeastern Ohio, to human based---prescribed burning of grasslands in central Ohio. Specifically, my research questions are: 1.What is the spider community responses and/or succession in response to disturbances? 2. What do changes in spider community composition and structure reveal about habitat structure and changes in post-disturbance ecosystem development? 3. Do those spiders that are disturbance specialists share similar life traits that we can use to classify all spiders on a spectrum from disturbance specialist to disturbance avoiders?;I found that there are succession responses of the spider community, and that the vegetation structure and succession stage are primary drivers of those changes. These differences affected the diversity, abundance, and overall spider community composition. Additionally, I found that many species/families/guilds of spiders are indicator species of habitat successional stages.;By studying the changes in spider communities (including community composition, diversity and abundance) we can gain insights into the development of ecosystems impacted by disturbances, as well as insights into many aspects of the habitat structure and quality. This information, in turn, can be applied to active ecosystem to provide more holistic evaluations. |
