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A Comparison Of Community Composition Analyses For The Assessment Of Responses To Wood-Ash Soil Amendment By Free-Living Nematodes, Paul B.L. George

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Land-use changes can have far-reaching consequences for resident communities and ecosystem functioning. Developing appropriate assessment methods to observe and quantify this change is an important application of community ecology. Here I compare four methods of community assessment for free-living soil nematodes under forest harvesting disturbance and wood ash application. Neither morphological assessment (richness, abundance, diversity) nor molecular assessment (morpho-richness using T-RFLP) was responsive to experimental treatments. Trait-based approaches (Maturity Index (MI) and Body Size Spectra (BSS)) were more sensitive to forest harvest and wood-ash amendment treatments. The efficacy of these methods was also qualitatively compared. Of all methods, the BSS …