Abstract

From October to November, 2004, we investigated eight soil macrofauna communities from urban greenbelts at Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province. We found a total of 1231 soil macrofauna individuals, belonging to 20 orders, 8 classes, and 3 phyla. The dominant orders were Plesiopora, Hymenoptera, Diplura, and Araneida, while the frequent orders were Lumbricida, Isopoda, Stylommatophora, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Diptera, and Homoptera, and others were rare orders. The compositions and the quantities of soil macrofauna communities differed in different habitats. We found that the complexity index of community (C) was better than the Shannon-Wiener index (H′) in indicating the complexity and diversity of the communities, and it could adjust for the influence of the number of individuals. The vertical distribution of soil macrofauna showed obvious surface assembly phenomenon. Using the hierarchical cluster and non-matric multi-dimentional scaling methods, the eight communities were classified into six groups: the turf group, grassland group, new turf group, man-made hurst with herbage group, man-made hurst without herbage group, and suburban shrubbery group. The hierarchical cluster and the non-matric multi-dimentional scaling ordination are suitable for analyzing biodiversity differences among soil fauna communities.