Elevation and leaf litter interact in determining the structure of ant communities on a tropical mountain

Biotropica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimmy Moses ◽  
Tom M. Fayle ◽  
Vojtech Novotny ◽  
Petr Klimes

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1582) ◽  
pp. 3256-3264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Woodcock ◽  
David P. Edwards ◽  
Tom M. Fayle ◽  
Rob J. Newton ◽  
Chey Vun Khen ◽  
...  

South East Asia is widely regarded as a centre of threatened biodiversity owing to extensive logging and forest conversion to agriculture. In particular, forests degraded by repeated rounds of intensive logging are viewed as having little conservation value and are afforded meagre protection from conversion to oil palm. Here, we determine the biological value of such heavily degraded forests by comparing leaf-litter ant communities in unlogged (natural) and twice-logged forests in Sabah, Borneo. We accounted for impacts of logging on habitat heterogeneity by comparing species richness and composition at four nested spatial scales, and examining how species richness was partitioned across the landscape in each habitat. We found that twice-logged forest had fewer species occurrences, lower species richness at small spatial scales and altered species composition compared with natural forests. However, over 80 per cent of species found in unlogged forest were detected within twice-logged forest. Moreover, greater species turnover among sites in twice-logged forest resulted in identical species richness between habitats at the largest spatial scale. While two intensive logging cycles have negative impacts on ant communities, these degraded forests clearly provide important habitat for numerous species and preventing their conversion to oil palm and other crops should be a conservation priority.



PLoS ONE ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. e93049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rogério R. Silva ◽  
Carlos Roberto F. Brandão


2001 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 761-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changlu Wang ◽  
John Strazanac ◽  
Linda Butler


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 515-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana M. Silveira ◽  
Jos Barlow ◽  
Rafael B. Andrade ◽  
Luiz A. M. Mestre ◽  
Sébastien Lacau ◽  
...  

Fire is an important land-management tool in tropical forest landscapes. However, these fires sometimes escape into surrounding forests (Uhl & Buschbacker 1985), and are one of the most severe disturbances threatening tropical forest biodiversity (Barlowet al2006). These forest fires have become more frequent over the last decades due to the combined effect of selective logging, fragmentation and abnormal droughts that increase the flammability of forests, and agriculture expansion that brings the ignition sources (Aragão & Shimabukuro 2010).



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gibran Renoy Pérez-Toledo ◽  
Fabricio Villalobos ◽  
Rogerio R. Silva ◽  
Claudia E. Moreno ◽  
Marcio Pie ◽  
...  

Abstract Despite the long-standing interest in the organization of ant communities across elevational gradients, few studies have incorporated the evolutionary information to understand the historical processes that underlay such patterns. Through the evaluation of phylogenetic α and β-diversity, we analyzed the structure of leaf-litter ant communities along the Cofre de Perote mountain in Mexico and inferred its putative driving forces. Lowland and some highland sites showed phylogenetic clustering, whereas intermediate elevations and the highest site presented phylogenetic overdispersion. We infer that strong environmental constrains found at the bottom and the top elevations are favoring closely-related species to prevail at those elevations. Conversely, more benign conditions at intermediate elevations suggest interspecific interactions being more important in these environments. Total phylogenetic dissimilarity was driven by the turnover component, indicating that the turnover of ant species along the mountain is actually shifts of lineages adapted to particular locations resembling their ancestral niche. The greater phylogenetic dissimilarity between communities was related to greater temperature distances probably due to narrow thermal tolerances inherit to several ant lineages that evolved in more stable conditions. Our results suggest that the interplay between environmental filtering, interspecific competition and habitat specialization plays an important role in the assembly of leaf-litter ant communities along elevational gradients.



2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia L. Gray ◽  
Owen T. Lewis ◽  
Arthur Y. C. Chung ◽  
Tom M. Fayle


2014 ◽  
Vol 326 ◽  
pp. 109-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landry Cizungu ◽  
Jeroen Staelens ◽  
Dries Huygens ◽  
Jean Walangululu ◽  
Daniel Muhindo ◽  
...  


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flávio Siqueira de Castro ◽  
Pedro Giovâni Da Silva ◽  
Ricardo Solar ◽  
Geraldo Wilson Fernandes ◽  
Frederico de Siqueira Neves


1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsten A. Brühl ◽  
Maryati Mohamed ◽  
K. Eduard Linsenmair

The ant communities of the leaf litter were studied along an elevational gradient on Mount Kinabalu in primary rain forest systems ranging from dipterocarp hill forest to dwarf forest of the highest altitudes (560, 800, 1130, 1360, 1530, 1740, 1930, 2025, 2300, 2600 m a.s.l.). The litter ant fauna along the gradient included 283 species of 55 genera. The number of ant species in the leaf litter decreased exponentially without evidence of a peak in species richness at mid-elevations. This result is in contrast to many findings on altitudinal gradients in ants and other animal groups. Most ant species have a very limited altitudinal range leading to high turnover values when comparing communities of different altitudes. Of the ant species, 74% were even restricted to one site. As evident from this study, altitudinal ranges of species are very narrow. Elevational gradients are therefore extremely species-rich and might serve as a prime example of hot spots of biodiversity. This fact is of great concern when implementing conservation strategies.





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