Abstract

Among the many human activities that cause diversity loss, urban development produces some of the greatest local extinction rates and frequently eliminates the large majority of species. The aim of this study is to evaluate termite’s diversity in some natural relict forests of the city of Yaoundé. These relict forests persist in mountainous areas where anthropogenic activities are limited due to a very steep slope. Because of this, the study was conducted in four mountains of these areas: Messa, Akok Ndoé, Mbokdoum, and Nkolondom. The experimental design at each site consists of a block of 10,000 m2, in which twenty elementary non-contiguous sections of 5 m x 2 m were delimited. Forty-eight termite’s species, distributed in soil-feeding, wood-feeding and fungus-growing termites, have been identified. The statistical analysis revealed that abundance and species richness of termites were similar between the four sampling sites. This may be due to a convergent response of termite assemblages to the same regime of disturbances; but diversity was higher in the Messa site than in the other sites. The urban-rural diversity gradient regularly observed in previous researches has not been detected in this study. This result demonstrates that the disturbance gradient is the main driver regulating diversity in this part of the Congo Basin. Moreover, the Spearman test showed a significant correlation between pHwater and abundance of wood-feeding termites.

Key words: urban development, termites, diversity, relict forest