Araneae morphospecies in pitfall traps in sub project 7 in KiLi project

Morphospecies of reasonable quality, but not checked by a taxonomist. identification at family level should hold.

We sampled arthropod assemblages in disturbed and undisturbed vegetation types along an elevational gradient of 860–4550 m asl on the southern slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. On each site, ten pitfall traps were evenly spaced along two 50 m transects, with a distance of 10 m between individual traps and 20 m between transects. Pitfall traps were filled with 100–200 ml of a mixture of ethylene glycol and water (1:1 vol/vol) with a drop of liquid soap to break surface tension. Traps were exposed for 7 days each during two to five sampling events in both the dry and wet seasons between May 2011 and October 2012. As the number of individuals collected in ten traps was very high, we had to confine the sorting and subsequent analysis to sub-sets of at least three traps per sampling site and sampling event. Unfortunately, we had to find out later that the ethylen glycol procured locally was actually a mixture of ethylen glycol and 2-ethoxyethanol, which is a strong oxidizing chemical. Therefore, any sequencing of specimen caught in pitfall traps was impossible.

Haas, Michael. 2014. Master thesis. The influence of elevation on community composition and trophic position of spiders. University of Marburg

The KiLi project (2010-2018) is a German Science Foundation (DFG) funded research unit (DFG research unit FOR1246) that focuses on biodiversity and ecosystem processes along altitudinal and disturbance gradients on Mt. Kilimanjaro (Tanzania, Africa), capitalizing on its world-wide unique range of climatic and vegetation zones. The research unit comprises 2 central projects and 7 subprojects from various disciplines. On a total of 60 study sites in both natural and human-disturbed ecosystems biodiversity (e.g. plants, soil arthropods, ants, bees, frogs, lizards, bats, birds), related ecosystem processes (decomposition, seed dispersal, pollination, herbivory, predation), and biogeochemical processes and properties of ecosystems (climate, soil properties and nutrient status, regulation of water and carbon fluxes, trace gas emissions, primary productivity, functional diversity) are analyzed.