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Urban areas may serve as habitat and corridors for dry-adapted, heat tolerant species; an example from ants

Urban Ecosystems volume 14, pages 135–163 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

We collected ants from six urban and one forest land-use types in Raleigh, NC to examine the effects of urbanization on species richness and assemblage composition. Since urban areas are warmer (i.e., heat island effect) we also tested if cities were inhabited by species from warmer/drier environments. Species richness was lower in industrial areas relative to other urban and natural environments. There are two distinct ant assemblages; 1) areas with thick canopy cover, and 2) more disturbed open urban areas. Native ant assemblages in open environments have more southwestern (i.e., warmer/drier) distributions than forest assemblages. High native species richness suggests that urban environments may allow species to persist that are disappearing from natural habitat fragments. The subset of species adapted to warmer/drier environments indicates that urban areas may facilitate the movement of some species. This suggests that urban adapted ants may be particularly successful at tracking future climate change.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank E. Spicer for assistance in collecting and sorting traps and P. Ward for helping identify specimens. G. Ryman, K. Somers, and D. Urban assisted us with GIS data. Two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments. SBM and JS were funded in part by the Pest Management Foundation and the Blanton J. Whitmire endowment. RRD, MDW, SBM, and BG were supported during this work by DOE-NICCR grant, DOE-PER grnt (DE-FG02-08ER64510), and a NASA Biodiversity Grant (NNX09AK22G). NASA Earth Systems Science Fellowship funded Landsat image processing, which was performed by JOS at the Duke University Landscape Ecology Laboratory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Entomology, North Carolina State University, 3324 Gardner Hall, Box 7613, Raleigh, NC, 27695-7613, USA

    Sean B. Menke & Jules Silverman

  2. Department of Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Sean B. Menke, Benoit Guénard, Michael D. Weiser & Robert R. Dunn

  3. W.M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Sean B. Menke, Benoit Guénard & Robert R. Dunn

  4. Biospheric Sciences Branch, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Joseph O. Sexton

Authors
  1. Sean B. Menke
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  2. Benoit Guénard
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  3. Joseph O. Sexton
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  4. Michael D. Weiser
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  5. Robert R. Dunn
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sean B. Menke.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 2 Southern and western distributional extents of native ant species based on the North American Database of Ant Species (http://www.antmacroecology.org/projects.html). Maximum temperature and minimum precipitation were extracted from WorldClim data based on the species range
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Appendix 2

Table 3 Presence / absence matrix for all sites categorized by land-use types. A = Agriculture, B = Business, * = non-native species
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Table 4 Presence / absence matrix for all sites categorized by land-use types. G = Greenway, I = Industrial, P = Park, * = non-native species
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Table 5 Presence / absence matrix for all sites categorized by land-use types. R = Residential, * = non-native species
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Table 6 Presence / absence matrix for all sites categorized by land-use types. F = Forest, * = non-native species
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Appendix 3

Table 7 Comparison of all possible pair-wise combinations of land-use types with MRPP, based on Sorensen distances. A = chance-corrected between-group agreement; p = probability of Type I error for no difference between groups. Signigicant p-value after Bonferonni correction = 0.00238
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Menke, S.B., Guénard, B., Sexton, J.O. et al. Urban areas may serve as habitat and corridors for dry-adapted, heat tolerant species; an example from ants. Urban Ecosyst 14, 135–163 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-010-0150-7

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