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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2013

  • Title: Ant functional diversity in temperate-zone forests: a comparison with Neotropical communities
  • Primary Author: Rogerio Silva (Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi)
  • Additional Authors: Carlos Brandão (Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de S�o Paulo); Israel Del Toro (University of Massachusetts ); Aaron Ellison (Harvard University)
  • Abstract:

    The influence of regional and local processes on community structure is a major focus of ecology. The relative importance of regional and local processes are believed to differ between tropical and temperate environments. In the present study we compared the morphological space and functional diversity between ant communities in tropical and temperate forests. Further, we used a trait-based approach to determine the relative importance of niche and environmental filters in determining ant community structure, comparing trait dispersion between tropical and temperate regions. Finally, we used abiotic and biotic factors to modeling species and community functional responses to environmental gradients across sites with clearly different environmental conditions. We surveyed ant communities at 26 sites along a latitudinal gradient of twenty degrees in the Atlantic forest (Brazil) and at 70 sites along a latitudinal gradient of ten degrees in temperate forests (Northeastern United States). We used mini-winklers apparatuses to sample leaf-litter ants in tropical forests, pitfall traps and systematic hand collecting to sample ants in temperate forests. We measured fifteen morphological traits on the basis of their function in 550 tropical ant species and 100 temperate ant species. Our morphological data set comprises 31,000 measures from 650 ant species, representing 1,994 individuals from neotropics and 583 ant individuals from temperate-zone forests.


    We expected that our results will allow us to identify the major functional traits and environmental factors involved in the assembly of tropical and temperate ant communities. The relationship between species richness and the morphological space occupied can provide insights into the processes that shape patterns of ant biodiversity.

  • Research Category: Biodiversity Studies