Spiders as surrogates of biodiversity in a geothermal area of northern Puebla, Mexico

The word biodiversity has gained popularity for more than 30 years; and we used this term for all aspects of biological diversity, from the richness of taxa, genetic variation, and ecosystem complexity. Thoroughly measuring biodiversity would be impractical due to many existing species and the effort that their identification would represent. Therefore, we need to find suitable surrogates or substitute taxa, which we can monitor because they represent broader biodiversity, helping us in ecological monitoring or conservation program planning. We tested the richness of spiders to measure their ability to estimate total spider richness at a site with geothermal influence. We use data from six locations with geothermal effect in the northern highlands of Puebla, Mexico. The genera richness of spiders was a good substitute for the total species richness, and the opposite happened with the family richness. Therefore, we recommend using this taxonomic level as a substitute to predict spider species richness or to evaluate and classify sites according to their importance for conservation. Here, we present the first spiders biodiversity data of a geothermal area and the use of spiders as surrogates in sites with geothermal condition.