Abstract
Functional trait-based approaches have provided advances in the understanding of community assembly rules. Broad generalisations remain, however, limited due to the idiosyncratic nature of taxa and ecosystems, especially in tropical regions. We use fine scale resolution (30 m grid) environmental variables and community surveys from nearly 100 secondary tropical forest sites to study niche-based or neutral assembly mechanisms in ground dwelling ants. This provides a unique opportunity for understanding fine scale drivers of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity in a region characterized by large topographic and climatic differences on a relatively small geographic scale. Precipitation emerged as the most consistent environmental correlate, in shaping taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional aspects of the communities. Functional diversity was weakly associated with topography and temperature related variables. The fourth corner model revealed that femur, scape and mandible length were key traits in response to precipitation, and that communities showed a functional homogenization towards shorter appendages at wetter sites. Our results suggest that neutral and deterministic assembly processes act in concert to shape the taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional aspects of leaf litter ant assemblages. The use of multiple complementary metrics and approaches along environmental gradients are powerful to reveal the subtilities of assembly processes and provide insight into the ways future communities might change.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and materials
The datasets used and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
References
Agrawal AA et al (2007) Filling key gaps in population and community ecology. Front Ecol Environ 5:145–152. https://doi.org/10.1890/1540-9295(2007)5[145:fkgipa]2.0.co;
Almeida RP, Silva RR, da Costa CA, Ferreira LV, Meir P, Ellison AM (2020) Induced drought strongly affects richness and composition of ground-dwelling ants in the eastern Amazon. bioRxiv
Andersen AN (2019) Responses of ant communities to disturbance: five principles for understanding the disturbance dynamics of a globally dominant faunal group. J Anim Ecol 88:350–362. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.12907
Arnan X, Cerda X, Retana J (2015) Partitioning the impact of environment and spatial structure on alpha and beta components of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity in European ants. PeerJ 3:e1241. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1241
Arnan X, Arcoverde GB, Pie MR, Ribeiro-Neto JD, Leal IR (2018) Increased anthropogenic disturbance and aridity reduce phylogenetic and functional diversity of ant communities in Caatinga dry forest. Sci Total Environ 631–632:429–438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.03.037
Barlow J et al (2016) Anthropogenic disturbance in tropical forests can double biodiversity loss from deforestation. Nature 535:144–147. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18326
Bernadou A, Espadaler X, Le Goff A, Fourcassié V (2014) Ant community organization along elevational gradients in a temperate ecosystem. Insectes Soc 62:59–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-014-0374-2
Bernard-Verdier M et al (2012) Community assembly along a soil depth gradient: contrasting patterns of plant trait convergence and divergence in a Mediterranean rangeland. J Ecol 100:1422–1433. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.12003
Bestelmeyer BT et al (2000) Field techniques for the study of ground-dwelling ants: an overview, description, and evaluation. In: Agosti D, Majer JD, Alonso LE, Schultz TR (eds) Ants: standard methods for measuring and monitoring biodiversity. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, pp 122–144
Betts MG et al (2017) Global forest loss disproportionately erodes biodiversity in intact landscapes. Nature 547:441–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23285
Bihn JH, Gebauer G, Brandl R (2010) Loss of functional diversity of ant assemblages in secondary tropical forests. Ecology 91:782–792. https://doi.org/10.1890/08-1276.1
Boet O, Arnan X, Retana J (2020) The role of environmental vs. biotic filtering in the structure of European ant communities: a matter of trait type and spatial scale. PLoS ONE 15:e0228625. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228625
Brassard F, Leong C-M, Chan H-H, Guénard B (2021) High diversity in urban areas: how comprehensive sampling reveals high ant species richness within one of the most urbanized regions of the world. Diversity 13:358–547. https://doi.org/10.3390/d13080358
Brown AM et al (2014) The fourth-corner solution—using predictive models to understand how species traits interact with the environment. Methods Ecol Evol 5:344–352. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.12163
Burnham KP, Anderson DA (2002) Model selection and multimodel inference: a practical information-theoretic approach, 2nd edn. Springer, New York
Chao A, Jost L (2012) Coverage-based rarefaction and extrapolation: standardizing samples by completeness rather than size. Ecology 93:2533–2547
Chao A et al (2014) Rarefaction and extrapolation with Hill numbers: a framework for sampling and estimation in species diversity studies. Ecol Monogr 84:45–67. https://doi.org/10.1890/13-0133.1
Corlett RT (1994) What is secondary forest? J Trop Ecol 10:445–447
Curtis PG, Slay CM, Harris NL, Tyukavina A, Hansen MC (2018) Classifying drivers of global forest loss. Science 361:1108–1111. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau3445
Derroire G et al (2016) Resilience of tropical dry forests—a meta-analysis of changes in species diversity and composition during secondary succession. Oikos 125:1386–1397. https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.03229
Dudgeon D, Corlett R (2004) The ecology and biodiversity of Hong Kong. Joint Publishing (HK) Ltd., Hong Kong, SAR
Dunn RR et al (2009) Climatic drivers of hemispheric asymmetry in global patterns of ant species richness. Ecol Lett 12:324–333. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01291.x
Economo EP, Narula N, Friedman NR, Weiser MD, Guenard B (2018) Macroecology and macroevolution of the latitudinal diversity gradient in ants. Nat Commun 9:1778. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04218-4
Eguchi K, Viet BT, Yamane S (2011) Generic synopsis of the formicidae of Vietnam (insecta: Hymenoptera), part I—Myrmicinae and Pseudomyrmecinae. Zootaxa 2878:1–61
Eguchi K, Viet BT, Yamane S (2014) Generic synopsis of the formicidae of Vietnam (Insecta: Hymenoptera), part II-Cerapachyinae, Aenictinae, Dorylinae, Leptanillinae, Amblyoponinae, Ponerinae, Ectatomminae and Proceratiinae. Zootaxa 3860:1–46
Faith D (1992) Conservation evaluation and phylogenetic diversity. Biol Conserv 61:1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/0006-3207(92)91201-3
Fayle TM, Eggleton P, Manica A, Yusah KM, Foster WA (2015) Experimentally testing and assessing the predictive power of species assembly rules for tropical canopy ants. Ecol Lett 18:254–262. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12403
Fichaux M et al (2019) Habitats shape taxonomic and functional composition of neotropical ant assemblages. Oecologia 189:501–513. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-019-04341-z
Folgarait PJ (1998) Ant biodiversity and its relationship to ecosystem functioning: a review. Biodivers Conserv 7:1221–1224
Gaston KJ et al (2018) Population abundance and ecosystem service provision: the case of birds. Bioscience 68:264–272. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biy005
Gerhold P, Carlucci MB, Proches S, Prinzing A (2018) The deep past controls the phylogenetic structure of present, local communities. Annu Rev Ecol Evol Syst 49:477–497
Gibb H et al (2015a) Climate mediates the effects of disturbance on ant assemblage structure. Proc Biol Sci/r Soc 282:20150418. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.0418
Gibb H, Stoklosa J, Warton DI, Brown AM, Andrew NR, Cunningham SA (2015b) Does morphology predict trophic position and habitat use of ant species and assemblages? Oecologia 177:519–531. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3101-9
Gibb H, Grossman BF, Dickman CR, Decker O, Wardle GM (2019) Long-term responses of desert ant assemblages to climate. J Anim Ecol 88:1549–1563. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13052
Gibson L et al (2011) Primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining tropical biodiversity. Nature 478:378–381. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10425
Guenard B, Weiser MD, Gomez K, Narula N, Economo EP (2017) The global ant biodiversity informatics (GABI) database: synthesizing data on the geographic distribution of ant species (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Myrmecol News 24:83–89
Guénard B, Lucky A (2011) Shuffling leaf litter samples produces more accurate and precise snapshots of terrestrial arthropod community composition. Environ Entomol 40:1523–1529. https://doi.org/10.1603/EN11104
Hall MA, Nimmo DG, Cunningham SA, Walker K, Bennett AF (2019) The response of wild bees to tree cover and rural land use is mediated by species’ traits. Biol Conserv 231:1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.12.032
Hansen MC et al (2013) High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change. Science 342:850–853. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1244693
Hölldobler B, Wilson EO (1990) The ants. Springer, Berlin, Germany
Holley JAC, Moreau CS, Laird JG, Suarez AV (2016) Subcaste-specific evolution of head size in the ant genus Pheidole. Biol J Linn Soc 118:472–485. https://doi.org/10.1111/bij.12769
Hsieh TC, Ma KH, Chao A, McInerny G (2016) iNEXT: an R package for rarefaction and extrapolation of species diversity (Hill numbers). Methods Ecol Evol 7:1451–1456. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.12613
Hubbell SP (2001) The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Hui FKC (2016) Boral-Bayesian ordination and regression analysis of multivariate abundance data in R. Methods Ecol Evol 7:744–750. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.12514
Kaspari M (1993) Body size and microclimate use in Neotropical granivorous ants. Oecologia 96:500–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00320507
Keddy PA (1992) Assembly rules—two goals for predictive community ecology. J Veg Sci 3:157–164. https://doi.org/10.2307/3235676
Kembel SW et al (2010) Picante: R tools for integrating phylogenies and ecology. Bioinformatics 26:1463–1464. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btq166
Kraft NJB et al (2014) Community assembly, coexistence and the environmental filtering metaphor. Funct Ecol 29:592–599. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.12345
Kunstler G et al (2012) Competitive interactions between forest trees are driven by species’ trait hierarchy, not phylogenetic or functional similarity: implications for forest community assembly. Ecol Lett 15:831–840. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2012.01803.x
La Sorte FA, Butchart SH, Jetz W, Bohning-Gaese K (2014) Range-wide latitudinal and elevational temperature gradients for the world’s terrestrial birds: implications under global climate change. PLoS ONE 9:e98361. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098361
Laliberté E, Legendre P (2010) A distance-based framework for measuring functional diversity from multiple traits. Ecology 91:299–305
Lee RH, Guénard B (2019) Choices of sampling method bias functional components estimation and ability to discriminate assembly mechanisms. Methods Ecol Evol 10:867–878. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.13175
Lee RH, Morgan B, Liu C, Fellowes JR, Guenard B (2021) Secondary forest succession buffers extreme temperature impacts on subtropical Asian ants. Ecol Monogr 91:e01480. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecm.1480
Legendre P, Galzin R, Harmelin-Vivien ML (1997) Relating behavior to habitat: solutions to the fourth-corner problem. Ecology 78:547–562
Lennox GD et al (2018) Second rate or a second chance? Assessing biomass and biodiversity recovery in regenerating Amazonian forests. Glob Chang Biol 24:5680–5694. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14443
Leong C-M, Shiao S-F, Guénard B (2017) Ants in the city, a preliminary checklist of Formicidae (Hymenoptera) in Macau, one of the most heavily urbanized regions of the world. Asian Myrmecol 9:e009014. https://doi.org/10.20362/am.009014
Lessard JP (2019) Ant community response to disturbance: a global synthesis. J Anim Ecol 88:346–349. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.12958
Lessard JP et al (2012) Strong influence of regional species pools on continent-wide structuring of local communities. Proc R Soc B Biol Sci 279:266–274. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.0552
Leven MR, Corlett RT (2004) Invasie birds in Hong Kong, China. Ornithol Sci 3:43–55
Levings S (1983) Seasonal, annual and among-site variation in the ground ant community of a deciduous tropical forest: some causes of patchy species distributions. Ecol Monogr 53:435–455
Liu C, Guenard B, Blanchard B, Peng YQ, Economo EP (2016) Reorganization of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic ant biodiversity after conversion to rubber plantation. Ecol Monogr 86:215–227. https://doi.org/10.1890/15-1464.1
Lyons KG, Brigham CA, Traut BH, Schwartz MW (2005) Rare species and ecosystem functioning. Conserv Biol 19:1019–1024. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2005.00106.x
Marjakangas EL et al (2022) Trait-based inference of ecological network assembly: a conceptual framework and methodological toolbox. Ecol Monogr 92:1–20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecm.1502
McCullagh P, Nelder A (1989) Generalized linear models. Chapman and Hall, London, UK
McGill BJ, Enquist BJ, Weiher E, Westoby M (2006) Rebuilding community ecology from functional traits. Trends Ecol Evol 21:178–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2006.02.002
Morgan B, Guénard B (2019) New 30 m resolution Hong Kong climate, vegetation, and topography rasters indicate greater spatial variation than global grids within an urban mosaic. Earth Syst Sci Data 11:1083–1098. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1083-2019
Muscarella R et al (2016) Functional convergence and phylogenetic divergence during secondary succession of subtropical wet forests in Puerto Rico. J Veg Sci 27:283–294. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.12354
Nooten SS, Schultheiss P, Rowe RC, Facey SL, Cook JM (2019) Habitat complexity affects functional traits and diversity of ant assemblages in urban green spaces (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Myrmecol News 29:67–77. https://doi.org/10.25849/myrmecol.news_029:067
Nooten SS, Lee RH, Guénard B (2021) Evaluating the conservation value of sacred forests for ant taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity in highly degraded landscapes. Biol Conserv. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109286
O’Brien RM (2007) A caution regarding rules of thumb for variance inflation factors. Qual Quant 41:673–690. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-006-9018-6
Oliver TH et al (2015) Biodiversity and resilience of ecosystem functions. Trends Ecol Evol 30:673–684. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2015.08.009
Paradis E, Schliep K (2018) Ape 5.0: an environment for modern phylogenetics and evolutionary analyses in R. Bioinformatics 35:526–528
Parr CL, Bishop TR (2022) The response of ants to climate change. Global Change Biol 28:3188–3205. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16140
Peeters C, Fuminori I (2001) Colony dispersal and the evolution of queen morphology in social hymenoptera. Annu Rev Ecol Syst 46:601–630
Perez-Toledo GR, Villalobos F, Silva RR, Moreno CE, Pie MR, Valenzuela-Gonzalez JE (2022) Alpha and beta phylogenetic diversities jointly reveal ant community assembly mechanisms along a tropical elevational gradient. Sci Rep 12:7728. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-11739-y
R Core Development Team (2021) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria
Revell LJ (2012) Phytools: an R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other things). Methods Ecol Evol 3:217–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2011.00169.x
Sala OE et al (2000) Global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100. Science 287:1770–1774. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.287.5459.1770
Sanders NJ (2003) Patterns of ant species richness along elevational gradients in an arid ecosystem. Global Ecol Biogeogr 12:93–102
Sanders NJ, Lessard J-P, Fitzpatrick MC, Dunn RR (2007) Temperature, but not productivity or geometry, predicts elevational diversity gradients in ants across spatial grains. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 16:640–649. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2007.00316.x
Sarty M, Abbott KL, Lester PJ (2006) Habitat complexity facilitates coexistence in a tropical ant community. Oecologia 149:465–473. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-006-0453-9
Sayer CA, Bullock JM, Martin PA (2017) Dynamics of avian species and functional diversity in secondary tropical forests. Biol Conserv 211:1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.05.004
Schultheiss P, Nooten SS, Wang R, Wong MKL, Brassard F, Guenard B (2022) The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 119:e2201550119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201550119
Silva RR, Brandão CF (2010) Morphological patterns and community organization in leaf-litter ant assemblages. Ecol Monogr 80:107–124
Sosiak CE, Barden P, Higham T (2020) Multidimensional trait morphology predicts ecology across ant lineages. Funct Ecol 35:139–152. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13697
Stoklosa J, Gibb H, Warton DI (2014) Fast forward selection for generalized estimating equations with a large number of predictor variables. Biometrics 70:110–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/biom.12118
Swenson NG (2014) Functional and phylogenetic ecology in R. Springer, New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London, New York
Vasconcelos HL, Maravalhas JB, Feitosa RM, Pacheco R, Neves KC, Andersen AN (2018) Neotropical savanna ants show a reversed latitudinal gradient of species richness, with climatic drivers reflecting the forest origin of the fauna. J Biogeogr 45:248–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13113
Vellend M (2010) Conceptual synthesis in community ecology. Q Rev Biol 85:183–206
Vellend M (2016) The theory of ecological communities. Princeton University Press, New Jersey
Wang Y, Naumann U, Wright ST, Warton DI (2012) mvabund—an R package for model-based analysis of multivariate abundance data. Methods Ecol Evol 3:471–474. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2012.00190.x
Warton DI, Wright ST, Wang Y (2012) Distance-based multivariate analyses confound location and dispersion effects. Methods Ecol Evol 3:89–101. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2011.00127.x
Webb CO (2000) Exploring the phylogenetic structure of ecological communities: an example for rain forest trees. Am Nat 156:145–155. https://doi.org/10.1086/303378
Webb CO, Ackerly DD, McPeek MA, Donoghue MJ (2002) Phylogenies and community ecology. Annu Rev Ecol Syst 33:475–505. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.33.010802.150448
Webb CT, Hoeting JA, Ames GM, Pyne MI, LeRoy PN (2010) A structured and dynamic framework to advance traits-based theory and prediction in ecology. Ecol Lett 13:267–283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01444.x
Weber NA (1938) The biology of fungus-growing ants. Part 4. Additional new forms. Part 5. The Attini of Bolivia. Rev Entomol 9:154–206
Wei T, Simko V, Xie Y, Jin Y, Zemla J (2017) Package ‘corrplot.’ Statistician 56:316–324
Weiher E, Clarke GDP, Keddy PA (1998) Community assembly rules, morphological dispersion, and the coexistence of plant species. Oikos 81:309–322. https://doi.org/10.2307/3547051
Weiher E, Freund D, Bunton T, Stefanski A, Lee T, Bentivenga S (2011) Advances, challenges and a developing synthesis of ecological community assembly theory. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 366:2403–2413. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0056
Weiser MD, Kaspari M (2006) Ecological morphospace of New World ants. Ecol Entomol 31:131–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0307-6946.2006.00759.x
Weiser MD et al (2010) Canopy and litter ant assemblages share similar climate-species density relationships. Biol Lett 6:769–772. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0151
Whitworth A, Pillco-Huarcaya R, Downie R, Villacampa J, Braunholtz LD, MacLeod R (2018) Long lasting impressions: after decades of regeneration rainforest biodiversity remains differentially affected following selective logging and clearance for agriculture. Glob Ecol Conserv. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2018.e00375
Wiescher PT, Pearce-Duvet JM, Feener DH (2012) Assembling an ant community: species functional traits reflect environmental filtering. Oecologia 169:1063–1074. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-012-2262-7
Woodcock P et al (2011) The conservation value of South East Asia’s highly degraded forests: evidence from leaf-litter ants. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 366:3256–3264. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0031
Zhuang XY, Corlett RT (1997) Forest and forest succession in Hong Kong, China. J Trop Ecol 13:857–866. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266467400011032
Zuur AF, Ieno EN, Walker NJ, Saveliev AA, Smith GM (2009) Mixed effect models and extensions in R, 1st edn. Springer, New York
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Kin Ho Chan, Roy Shun Chi Cheung, Roger Ho Lee and Brian Worthington for specimen collection, processing, identification and databasing. We are grateful to Patrick Schultheiss for fruitful discussions.
Funding
This study was funded by an Early Career Scheme Grant from the Research Grants Council (ECS-27106417) of the Hong Kong Government to BG; and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - 445715161 to SSN.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
SSN and BG conceived and designed the study. SSN analysed the data. SSN wrote the manuscript and BG provided editorial advice.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Additional information
Communicated by David Donoso.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Nooten, S.S., Guénard, B. Ant communities in disturbed subtropical landscapes: is climate more important than stochastic processes?. Oecologia 200, 441–454 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05276-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05276-8