10.5061/DRYAD.302BD95
Adams, Benjamin
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Schnitzer, Stefan
Marquette University
Yanoviak, Stephen
University of Louisville
Data from: Connectivity explains local ant community structure in a
Neotropical forest canopy: a large-scale experimental approach
Dryad
dataset
2019
National Science Foundation
https://ror.org/021nxhr62
DEB-1252614, DEB-0845071, DEB-1019436, DEB-1822473
2019-03-01T22:13:12Z
2019-03-01T22:13:12Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2673
481435 bytes
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CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Understanding how habitat structure and resource availability affect local
species distributions is a key goal of community ecology. Where habitats
occur as a mosaic, variation in connectivity among patches influences both
local species richness and composition, and connectivity is a key
conservation concern in fragmented landscapes. Similarly, availability of
limiting resources frequently determines species co-existence or
exclusion. For primarily cursorial arthropods like ants, gaps between
neighboring trees are a significant barrier to movement through the forest
canopy. Competition for limited resources such as nest sites also promotes
antagonistic interactions. Lianas (woody vines) connect normally isolated
neighboring tree crowns and often have hollow stems inhabited by ants. We
used two large-scale liana removal experiments to determine how
connectivity and nest site availability provided by lianas affect arboreal
ant species richness, species composition, and β-diversity in a lowland
tropical forest in Panama. Removing lianas from a tree crown reduced ant
species richness up to 35%, and disproportionately affected species that
require large foraging areas. Adding artificial connectivity to trees
mitigated the effects of liana removal. Ant colonization of artificial
nests was higher (73% occupied) in trees without lianas vs. trees with
lianas (28% occupied). However, artificial nests typically were colonized
by existing polydomous, resident ant species. As a result, nest addition
did not affect ant community structure. Collectively, these results
indicate that lianas are important to the maintenance of arboreal ant
diversity specifically by providing connectivity among neighboring tree
crowns. Anticipated increases in liana abundance in this forest could
increase the local (tree-level) species richness of arboreal ants, with a
compositional bias toward elevating the density of broad-ranging
specialist predators.
Adams et al Ecology 2019 final data
Panama