Effects of Vegetation Structure on Ant Diversity in Different Seasonal Periods in Impacted Fragments of Atlantic Forest

Sampaio, Raquel Cetto; Laviski, Bianca Ferreira da Silva; Coelho, Rui; Queiroz, Jarbas Marçal

doi:10.13102/sociobiology.v70i2.7949

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 45 publications

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“…Vegetation may drive the fine-scale spatial distribution of sympatric species by dictating the availability of resources at multiple scales ( Kubiak, Galiano & de Freitas, 2015 ), both spatial and temporal. Drawing on markedly different studies in the same forest type highlights the importance of vegetation; in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, bat diet was best explained by landscape composition, particularly vegetation density ( Oelbaum et al, 2022 ), while in the same forest, the diversity of ants was explained by a combination of shrub leaf density and tree circumference ( Sampaio et al, 2023 ). Among macropods, Le Mar & Mcarthur (2005) showed that sympatric wallabies in Tasmania had similar food requirements and foraged in the same habitats by night, but that their selection of daytime refuges differed markedly, probably due to their contrasting predator avoidance strategies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Occurrence patterns of sympatric forest wallabies: assessing the influence of structural habitat attributes on the coexistence of Thylogale thetis and T. stigmatica

Smith,

Andrew,

Vernes

2024

PeerJ

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Background We studied the occurrence of two sympatric wallabies, the red-necked pademelon (Thylogale thetis) and the red-legged pademelon (T. stigmatica) in northeastern New South Wales, Australia in relation to structural habitat attributes. At our study site, both species inhabit closed forest environments and have overlapping distributions, but T. thetis leaves the forest at night to graze adjacent grassy forest edges whereas T. stigmatica remains within the forest and browses forest vegetation. The objectives of the study were to investigate how structural attributes of two forest types, wet sclerophyll forest and rainforest, relate to the fine-scale occurrence of these two wallaby species within the forested environment. Methods We gathered occurrence data from 48 camera trap stations divided equally between rainforest and wet sclerophyll forest. At each camera point, we also measured a range of structural habitat attributes to determine habitat affiliations for the two Thylogale species. Principal component analyses were used to describe major trends in habitat, and generalised linear models were used to describe the efficacy of the variables in predicting habitat occurrence of each species. Results The number of occurrences of Thylogale thetis was significantly greater than occurrences of T. stigmatica, which was driven by significantly greater occurrences of T. thetis in wet sclerophyll forest. There was both spatial and temporal partitioning between the two species; there was a significant difference in the occurrences of the two species at individual cameras and T. stigmatica had a different activity schedule than T. thetis in wet sclerophyll forest, where the latter reached its greatest rate of occurrence. At a finer (camera station) scale, occurrences of T. thetis increased with proximity to roads and grassy edges and at sites that were less rocky and less steep. T. stigmatica occurrence increased in the presence of rainforest elements like vines, palms and ferns, more ground-level cover and tree-fall gaps and at sites with fewer emergent eucalypts. Conclusion Our findings have implications for managing these pademelons and their habitats. T. thetis is a common species that was encountered more often than T. stigmatica, and it responded positively to human disturbance like roadsides and grassy edges, presumably because these areas provided good grazing opportunities. By comparison, T. stigmatica is a threatened species, and it responded to natural disturbance like tree-fall gaps where lateral cover was greater, and where rainforest food plants may be more abundant. Our results suggest, therefore, that conservation of the threatened T. stigmatica requires the preservation of intact rainforest.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Occurrence patterns of sympatric forest wallabies: assessing the influence of structural habitat attributes on the coexistence of Thylogale thetis and T. stigmatica

Smith,

Andrew,

Vernes

2024

PeerJ

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Ant-plant networks exhibit distinct species diversity but similar organization in urban and wild areas of neotropical savannas

de Oliveira Lima,

de Oliveira Sá,

Morais

et al. 2024

Urban Ecosyst

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Dissecting earthworm diversity in tropical rainforests

Goulpeau,

Hedde,

Ganault

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Tropical rainforests are among the most emblematic ecosystems in terms of biodiversity. However, our understanding of the structure of tropical biodiversity is still incomplete, particularly for certain groups of soil organisms such as earthworms, whose importance for ecosystem functioning is widely recognised. This study aims at determining the relative contribution of alpha and beta components to earthworm regional diversity at a hierarchy of nested spatial scales in natural ecosystems of French Guiana. For this, we performed a hierarchical diversity partitioning of a large dataset on earthworm communities, in which DNA barcode-based operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were used as species surrogates. Observed regional diversity comprised 256 OTUs. We found that alpha diversity was lower than predicted by chance, regardless of the scale considered. Community-scale alpha diversity was on average 7 OTUs. Beta diversity among remote landscapes was higher than expected by chance, explaining as much as 87% of regional diversity. This points to regional mechanisms as the main driver of species diversity distribution in this group of organisms with low dispersal capacity. At more local scales, multiplicative beta diversity was higher than expected by chance between habitats, while it was lower than expected by chance between communities in the same habitat. This highlights the local effect of environmental filters on the species composition of communities. The calculation of a Chao 2 index predicts that as much as 1,700 species could be present in French Guiana, which represents a spectacular increase compared with available checklists, and calls into question the commonly accepted estimates of global number of earthworm species.

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Effects of Vegetation Structure on Ant Diversity in Different Seasonal Periods in Impacted Fragments of Atlantic Forest

Cited by 3 publications

References 45 publications

Occurrence patterns of sympatric forest wallabies: assessing the influence of structural habitat attributes on the coexistence of Thylogale thetis and T. stigmatica

Occurrence patterns of sympatric forest wallabies: assessing the influence of structural habitat attributes on the coexistence of Thylogale thetis and T. stigmatica

Ant-plant networks exhibit distinct species diversity but similar organization in urban and wild areas of neotropical savannas

Dissecting earthworm diversity in tropical rainforests

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