Monitoring the Diversity of Hunting Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) on a Fragmented and Restored Andean Landscape

Abstract

Hunting ants are predators of organisms belonging to different trophic levels. Their presence, abundance, and diversity may reflect the diversity of other ants and contribute to evaluate habitat conditions. Between 2003 and 2005 the restoration of seven corridors in an Andean rural landscape of Colombia was performed. The restoration took place in lands that were formerly either forestry plantations or pasturelands. To evaluate restoration progress, hunting ants were intensely sampled for 7 yr, using sifted leaf litter and mini-Winkler, and pitfall traps in 21 plots classified into five vegetation types: forests, riparian forests, two types of restored corridors, and pasturelands. The ant communities were faithful to their habitat over time, and the main differences in ant composition, abundance, and richness were due to differences among land use types. The forests and riparian forests support 45% of the species in the landscape while the restored corridors contain between 8.3-25%. The change from forest to pasturelands represents a loss of 80% of the species. Ant composition in restored corridors was significantly different than in forests but restored corridors of soil of forestry plantations retained 16.7% more species than restored corridors from pasturelands. Ubiquitous hunting ants, Hypoponera opacior (Forel) and Gnamptogenys ca andina were usually associated with pastures and dominate restored corridors. Other cryptic, small, and specialized hunting ants are not present in the restored corridors. Results suggest that the history of land use is important for the biodiversity of hunting ants but also that corridors have not yet effectively contributed toward conservation goals.

Restoration of riparian forest corridors: eight years monitoring the diversity of soil ants in an Andean rural landscape

“…Ants have been monitored in the study area (Colombian Andes) since 2002. It had been previously found that riparian forests present high ant richness of certain guilds, very similar in composition to that of large forest fragments, thus revealing the importance of riparian forests for landscape connectivity and for maintaining diversity (Mendoza et al, 2007;Jiménez et al, 2008, Herrera-Rangel et al, 2015. In other studies conducted near the same region, soil ants also showed preference for production systems with tree cover (e.g.…”

The surrounding landscape influences the diversity of leaf-litter ants in riparian cloud forest remnants

“…Viable alternatives to reconcile conservation and land productivity should be explored (forest-pastoral systems, expansion of riparian vegetation with useful native tree plantations, enrichment of pine plantations, etc.) [ 70 , 71 ].…”