| PRESENTATION INFO |
| TITLE: |
PREY AVAILABILITY MEDIATES SPIDER RESPONSE TO SHRUB ARCHITECTURE: A STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING APPROACH |
| TYPE: |
Presentation |
| Abstract: |
Habitat structure is associated with the abundance and diversity of various organisms. Spiders are especially sensitive to plant architecture even though they are not directly reliant on a particular plant species as a food source. It remains unclear, however, whether spiders respond directly to plant architecture or indirectly via differences in prey availability caused by different structures, or some combination thereof. Here, we explicitly evaluate the relative role of prey availability in mediating the relationship between shrub architecture and spider communities in a shrub-steppe environment in northern Utah, USA by using structural equation modeling, a procedure well-suited for partitioning direct and indirect effects. Our results suggest that both direct and indirect pathways are involved in the relationship between shrub architecture and spider density and species diversity (H’), while spider species richness was affected only indirectly.
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