Seasonal Dynamics and Compositional Shifts of Arthropod Communities across Forage and Palmar Crops in a Semi-Arid Region (Naama, Algeria)

Semi-arid agroecosystems are susceptible to environmental change, however there is a shortage of functional biodiversity baseline data. in the Saharan transition zone of the Southwest Algeria (Naama region) The collection of arthropods was performed during 11 months, from January to November 2022, in both the fodder and palmar crops. In all 72 arthropod taxa were recognized under 11 orders and 5 classes. We utilized generalized least squares (GLS) models accounting for temporal autocorrelation to assess the impacts of temperature, humidity on diversity features and to explore changes in community composition. PC1 was found as a gradient from warm and dry to cold and rainy circumstances. PC1 showed significant positive influence on Shannon index (p=0.001), species richness (p=0.006) and Simpson index (p=0.004).  This research aimed to study the temporal dynamics on abundance and diversity of arthropods in two distinct kinds of crops (forage and palmar), and to identify the main environmental factors that govern these communities.

This dataset contains occurrence data in Darwin Core format for arthropods sampled in the Naama region, Algeria (2022).