Abstract
Beta diversity measures changes in species composition and, if partitioned, isolates the contributions of turnover and nestedness in such differences. High beta diversity values have been reported to ant assemblages found at the soil surface, tree canopy and underground soil layers. However, studies on ant assemblage at small-scale stratification have drawbacks regarding to sampling designs and on the searching of turnover and nestedness patterns contribution to overall beta diversity. We investigated how ant assemblage beta diversity changes along the epigaeic-hypogaeic and epigaeic-arboreal gradients in a Neotropical rainforest remnant and whether this change is driven by turnover or nestedness. We sampled ants at different depths/heights and calculated the Jaccard index between the ants sampled at these strata and the ones at the soil surface as an overall beta diversity measurement. Then, we partitioned the Jaccard index to account for turnover and nestedness separately. Overall beta diversity values did not significantly change, being consistently high along both gradients. Turnover’s proportional contribution to beta diversity significantly increased with increasing height but did not significantly change with increasing depth. Turnover values were high throughout the subterranean gradient. This suggests that epigaeic ants better explore low heights than low depths. Our results revealed that the assemblages from both gradients are continuously different from the soil assemblage, that this difference is mainly due to turnover, and that turnover’s importance increases along the epigaeic-arboreal gradient. These conclusions were only possible due to isolating the effects of turnover and nestedness, reinforcing the importance of doing so.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank M. Merinha, M. Madureira, A. Maradini and R. Solar for the assistance during fieldwork. We would like to thank J. Chaul, G. Camacho, R. Feitosa, A. Ferreira, R. Probst, T. Silva and V. Sandoval for the enormous help with ant identification. We would like to thank M. Gastauer for the help with the tree identification. We would also like to thank L. Ré Jorge, K. Sidhu, A. Lee and A. Queiroz for the fruitful discussions regarding the statistical analyses of our data. Our thanks to the Freitas family, for granting us access to the forest fragment where we conducted the ant sampling. We thank CNPq for the scholarship of FAS and FAPEMIG for financial support.
Funding
The study received fundings from FAPEMIG (project number APQ-00154-12). F. M. Rezende and R. S. Jesus were awarded by grants of FAPEMIG. F. A. Schmidt was awarded by CNPq post-doc grant.
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F. A. Schmidt conceived and designed the study. F. A. Schmidt, F. M. Rezende and R. S. Jesus carried out data sampling. F. M. Rezende and R. S. Jesus performed ant sorting and identification. F. M. Rezende did the statistical analysis and wrote the original manuscript draft and final version. C. R. Ribas and J. H. Schoereder contributed by critical revision of the manuscript previous versions.
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Rezende, F.d.M., Schmidt, F.A., Jesus, R.S. et al. Beyond beta: diversity partitioning reveals different underlying patterns in ant assemblages along two small scale gradients in a Brazilian neotropical forest. Int J Trop Insect Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42690-024-01244-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42690-024-01244-2