Poster: Quantifying the effects of landscaping styles on arthropod food web composition in new suburban developments

The positive impacts of native landscaping plants on arthropod communities are well known. Less understood is how this landscaping approach affects emerging arthropod food web composition and stability in new development projects. Moreover, many studies take a taxa specific approach to quantifying the effects of native landscaping plants. While we have learned much using taxa-specific approaches, they limit understanding on the effects of overall food web composition and stability. Studies focused on the diversity of one or more arthropod functional groups may help to fill this knowledge gap. Here we capitalize on two ongoing suburban development projects occurring next to each other on the periphery of Orlando, FL to better understand the effects of native landscaping in new developments on arthropod food webs. One development is installing native-dominated landscaping while the other is installing conventional turf-dominated landscaping. We will sample arthropods in 24 yards of these developments three times using pitfall and sticky card traps. From these samples, we will quantify the abundance and diversity of herbivores and predators, using these metrics as indicators of food web composition and stability. This dataset lends itself to multiple statistical methods, including linear mixed effects-models and structural equational modeling, for detecting both the effects of these landscaping styles on arthropod food webs and the mechanisms/pathways driving these effects. By quantifying the impacts of two very different development styles on food webs, this analysis will inform both general arthropod conservation strategies and landscaping practices in the future phases of both development projects.