Assessing the Relationship Between Vegetation Structure and Harvestmen Assemblage in an Amazonian Upland Forest

14 1. Arthropod diversity and non-flying arthropod food web are strongly influenced by 15 habitat components related to plant architecture and habitat structural complexity. 16 However, we still poorly understand the relationship between arthropod diversity and the 17 vegetation structure at different spatial scales. Here, we examined how harvestmen 18 assemblages are distributed across six local scale habitats (trees, dead trunks, palms, 19 bushes, herbs and litter), and along three proxies of vegetation structure (number of 20 palms, number of trees and litter depth) at mesoscale. 21 2. We collected harvestmen using cryptic manual search in 30 permanent plots of 250 m 22 at Reserva Ducke, Amazonas, Brazil. The 30 plots cover approximately 25 km 2 of upland 23. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not. 2 forests. At a local scale, harvestmen were most diverse and abundant on trees. The likely 24 preference of trees by harvestmen may be related to the variety of local microhabitats 25 offered by large trees. However, despite the strong link between number of harvestman 26 species and individuals with large trees, only harvestmen assemblages composition were 27 related with number of trees and with number of palms, at mesoscale. 28 3. Harvestman richness and abundance were not related with any vegetation structure 29 predictor at mesoscale. Therefore, areas of upland forest in the central Amazon with large 30 trees and palms do not harbor more harvestman species nor individuals, but are suitable 31 to maintain different harvestmen assemblages.