Does nesting habitat preference predict connectivity effects on ants?

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Gabrielle R. Dugan, Department of Biological Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, Melissa A. Burt and Susan R. Whitehead, Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, Julian Resasco, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO

Background/Question/Methods:
Habitat fragmentation, a primary driver for global biodiversity loss, impacts species diversity by decreasing habitat area, decreasing connectivity among patches, and increasing edge effects. To study how this disturbance affects ecological communities, it is important to consider how traits influence mechanisms driving individual species responses. While species traits have become an important tool in understanding these mechanisms, they have been used less often for understanding the systems structuring insect communities. Ant species have a wide variation of traits, which creates an opportunity to understand the drivers behind how their communities change due to habitat disturbance from fragmentation. We used a large-scale fragmentation experiment to study how habitat fragmentation affects ant species richness through time. To examine the changes in species richness, we utilized ant community data that has been collected annually since 2015. We combined this with nesting habitat trait data collected using ant trait databases and literature searches for each species. In this study, we asked (1) how does habitat fragmentation affect ant species richness? (2) how does ant nest site microhabitat affect their response to habitat fragmentation?
Results/Conclusions:
We found that both habitat fragmentation and time since the start of sampling impacted species richness in ant communities across three years. Species richness was ~9% lower in experimental habitat patches connected via corridors than isolated controls, suggesting that corridors negatively impact ant community diversity. We also found that species richness increased ~17% over time since 2015. When analyzing how nest site preference interacted with habitat fragmentation, we found a 58% increase in litter nesting species from 2015 to 2017. We predict this is due to the accumulation of litter over time since prescribed fire in all sites in 2015. There were only small differences in species richness for soil- and wood-dwelling species. Nest site preference differences did not depend on patch connectivity. This project shows the importance of evaluating basic natural history traits when considering how ant communities might assemble under environmental change.