The structure of Carabid communities in some field-forest ecotones

Distrubution of selected forest and non-forest Carabid species was studied across 5 different field-forest ecotones.It has been found that the non-forest species become less abundant inwards the forest zone, while theforest species showed a less evident opposite tendency. The communities of open areas were characterised bythe greatest abundance, number of species, proportion of non-forest species, and total biomass ofCarabids. All the parameters had lower values in the "strict" ecotone, and forest stand zone, in particular.By contrast, proportion of large forest species, and MIB reached the highest level in the two latter zones.