Delimitation of adult and juvenile clusters
After collapsing the species that were indistingible by the COI fragment, the final values of species richness for adults and juveniles were 363 and 331, respectively. The combination of both lifestages yielded a total of 491 different species. Of those, 160 were found exclusively as adults, 128 exclusively as juveniles and 203 as both life stages. The addition of the species found only as juveniles represented a 35% increase with respect to all the species found as adults. Excluding PM1 (whose sequencing was unsuccessful) the number of matching species varied from 24 (in PM2) to 44 (in PP4) (Fig. 2). As for the percentages, PM2 was the plot where juveniles provided the greatest addition of richness (169% more species than only with adults), followed by PC2 (162%), PC3 (119%), PC4 (117%), PP3 (112%), PC1 (102%), PP1 (92%), PS2 (83%), PS1 (73%), PO1 (68%), PA1 (58%), PP2 (56%), PO2 (54%), PP4 (47%) and PA2 (44%).
The number of species recovered as juveniles was higher than that of adults in every park (5.4% higher in PO, 8.2% higher in PP, 17.6% higher in PA, 29.8% higher in PS, 45.9% higher in PC and 69.1% higher in PM). Most of the families showed a similar or identical species richness in adults and juveniles, but some specific families showed clear differences (Fig. 3). For example, the richness of juvenile orb-weavers (Araneidae) was much greater than the richness of adults in all the parks, and a similar trend (although to a lesser extent) was also observed in cob-weaving spiders (Theridiidae) and the sit-and-wait hunting families Philodromidae and Thomisidae crab spiders. Interestingly, for sheet-weaving spiders (Linyphiidae) the number of species represented as adults was greater than that of juveniles in the northern parks (as much as twice as high in PP) but the opposite trend was observed in the southern parks. While the number of sheet-weaving spider MOTUs collected as juveniles remained very similar across all parks, ranging from 12 to 17, the number of species recovered as adults decreased abruptly from the northern parks (16, 24 and 34) to the southern parks (7, 10 and 11).