Understorey spiders in rainforest fragments and shade-coffee plantations of the Valparai Plateau and Anamalai Hills, Western Ghats, India

This dataset documents understorey spider occurrences recorded along visual-search belt transects in rainforest fragments and shade-coffee plantations on the Valparai Plateau and Anamalai Hills, southern Western Ghats, India, between January and May 2005. Sampling covered 12 sites (ten rainforest fragments and two shade-coffee plantations) and produced 4,299 detection records of 4,565 individual spiders belonging to 156 morphospecies in 21 families and eight functional groups. The dataset bundle contains the raw occurrence records, the site and sampling-event metadata, a species checklist reconciled to the GBIF taxonomic backbone, the technical report that describes the study, a species-description appendix, and reference photographs of representative species. This dataset is published on GBIF at: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/76979a49-60bc-41f6-b56d-cc1de409f87eThe data correspond to the following publication: Kapoor, V. 2008. Effects of rainforest fragmentation and shade-coffee plantations on spider communities in the Western Ghats, India. Journal of Insect Conservation 12: 53-68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-006-9062-5