Aims of the project

It is in the interest of Mankind to study tropical rainforests and their mega-diverse arthropod inhabitants, as together they maintain a series of crucial ecosystem services and represent unrivaled amounts of genetic diversity.

As a result of ever-increasing habitat alteration, tropical rainforests continue to lose biodiversity before it has been collected, described and studied. While there has been a substantial effort to database known species, both description of new species from museum collections and their discovery in the field lag far behind this effort.

Pressing priorities include increasing collection rates of unknown species; understanding the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services (forest processes); assessing the impact of disturbance on biodiversity and forest processes; and developing cost-effective methods for biodiversity monitoring.

To address all these issues IBISCA aims are to study the beta-diversity (horizontal distribution), vertical stratification and seasonality of a wide array of phylogenetically distant arthropod groups, along with their ecology and relationships with forest processes and the impact of forest disturbance.