Ant-mediated ecosystem processes are driven by trophic community structure but mainly by the environment
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ECOSYSTEM ECOLOGY – ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Ant‑mediated ecosystem processes are driven by trophic community structure but mainly by the environment Alex Salas‑Lopez1 · Houadria Mickal2 · Florian Menzel2 · Jérôme Orivel1
Received: 28 January 2016 / Accepted: 24 September 2016 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Abstract The diversity and functional identity of organisms are known to be relevant to the maintenance of ecosystem processes but can be variable in different environments. Particularly, it is uncertain whether ecosystem processes are driven by complementary effects or by dominant groups of species. We investigated how community structure (i.e., the diversity and relative abundance of biological entities) explains the community-level contribution of Neotropical ant communities to different ecosystem processes in different environments. Ants were attracted with food resources representing six ant-mediated ecosystem processes in four environments: ground and vegetation strata in cropland and forest habitats. The exploitation frequencies of the baits were used to calculate the taxonomic and trophic structures of ant communities and their contribution to ecosystem processes considered individually or in combination (i.e., multifunctionality). We then investigated whether community structure variables could predict ecosystem processes and whether such relationships were affected by the environment. We found that forests presented a greater biodiversity and trophic complementarity Communicated by Nina Farwig. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00442-016-3741-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Alex Salas‑Lopez [email protected] 1
CNRS, UMR Ecologie de Forêts de Guyane, AgroParisTech, CIRAD, INRA, Université de Guyane, Université des Antilles, Campus agronomique, BP 316, 97379 Kourou Cedex, France
2
Department of Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Zoology, University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany
and lower dominance than croplands, but this did not affect ecosystem processes. In contrast, trophic complementarity was greater on the ground than on vegetation and was followed by greater resource exploitation levels. Although ant participation in ecosystem processes can be predicted by means of trophic-based indices, we found that variations in community structure and performance in ecosystem processes were best explained by environment. We conclude that determining the extent to which the dominance and complementarity of communities affect ecosystem processes in different environments requires a better understanding of resource availability to different species. Keywords Biodiversity—ecosystem functioning · Complementarity · Dominance · Formicidae · Food resources
Introduction The conversion of forests into agricultural ecosystems is one of the major causes of species loss and homogenization worldwide (Chapin et al. 2000; Lindemayer et al. 2012). Such changes have direct repercussions on the structure of ecolo
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