Estudo da biodiversidade dos Braconidae (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonoidea) em área de mata Atlântica do Parque Estadual do Jaraguá. São Paulo/SP.

Abstract

For the planning and environmental monitoring aiming at the conservation, the arthropods are appropriated as indicating species due to its great abundance, morphologic, taxonomic and functional diversities. Despite the potential for the use of Insecta as bioindicators, little attention has been spent to them by biologists, ecologists and taxonomists, not only in the current knowledge application, but also for new methodologies development. For this reason, this study proposal was to evaluate the potential use of the family Braconidae (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonoidea) as terrestrial biodiversity indicator in the State Park of Jaraguá, São Paulo state, Brazil. A multimetric characterization involving the environmental variables (temperature, luminosity and humidity) and biotic variables (vegetation, hosts and parasitoids) were applied in order to characterize the selected microenvironments. The samples of the organisms were obtained in a condensed way in four periods of ten days corresponding to the dry season (November of 1999 and July of 2000) and to the rainy one (March and December of 2000). In order to sample a large local faunistic diversity, three backing techniques of insects collection were used: Malaise traps, Yellow Pan Traps and Sweeping of the Vegetation. The clustering analysis method was applied to evidence the similarity among sampling sites in the dried and rainy periods. Many fast techniques of environment evaluation of quality adopt a multimetric boarding using a set of metric in order to evaluate the environment degradation. In this study we use as metric four categories of variables: variables of parasitoids community structure, ecological parasitoids variables, environmental variables and variables of the floristic composition. The Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was used aiming at evidencing possible standards in the sites of sampling in the different seasons in relation to the metric ones. Were captured 2449 specimens of Braconidae, in which the more collected subfamilies were Alysiinae, Doryctinae and Microgastrinae with approximately 74% of the total sample. The analysis allowed us to verify two groups of habitats, one formed by Sopé and Silêncio and another formed by Zé, Pico and Aloja. The results indicate a difference in the structure of the community, mainly in relation to the sites sampled, suggesting that the different uses of the ground can influence the biotic variables (Alysiinae, Microgastrinae, etc.) and the abiotic variables (luminosity, humidity, etc.). Moreover, this study indicates the potential use of some metric to the evaluation of environmental quality, considering the Braconidae as bioindicators.