| ABSTRACT Conservation of biodiversity in agroecosystems is an urgent need, and a suitable approach to maximize animal biodiversity and their services is the restoration of habitat heterogeneity. Here we investigated the value of increasing litter complexity in tree plantations of exotic pine for ground spiders. We hypothesized that increasing the litter complexity of these systems, as it would be the case in ecologically designed plantations, would increase spider aggregations. We performed a small-scale litter manipulation experiment within an exotic pine stand in the municipality of Minas do Leão, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and compared spider diversity in simple (only pine needles) and complex substrates (with the addition of diverse native... |
