Urban and peri-urban agricultural (UPA) production systems in West
African countries do not only mitigate food and financial insecurity,
they may also foster biodiversity of arthropods and partly compensate
for structural losses of natural environments. However, management
practices in UPA systems like irrigation may also contribute to
disturbances in arthropod ecology. To fill knowledge gaps in the
relationships between UPA management and arthropod populations, we
compared arthropods species across different irrigation sources in
Tamale. During a 72-h sampling period, 14,226 arthropods were caught
with pitfall traps and pan traps from 36 fields. These specimens
comprised 13 orders, 103 families, 264 genera, and 329 taxa (243
identified species, 86 unidentified species) and categorized into five
feeding guilds (carnivores, decomposers, herbivores, omnivores, and
pollinators). Species richness, species accumulation curves, and
diversity functions (richness, evenness, and dispersion) were calculated
to characterize the arthropod community. Non-metric multidimensional
scaling was applied to examine structural similarity of arthropod
communities among sites. To account for the effects of soil-related
data, we furthermore applied a redundancy analysis. Arthropods grouped
according to the irrigation water source, whereby the dipterans were
most dominant under wastewater conditions. Here, particularly the eye
gnat, Hippelates pusio, a disease-causing vector for humans,
accounted for the dipterans. The occurrence of three alien ant species
suggested community shifts through invasive species, while the
occurrence of seven ant species (at least one ant species occurred under
each water source) that form mutualistic relationships with aphids
highlighted future risks of aphid pest outbreak. Future studies on these
taxa should specifically target their ecological and economic effects
and potential countermeasures.