Effect of tropical forest disturbance on the competitive interactions within a diverse ant community.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how anthropogenic disturbance influences patterns of community composition and the reinforcing interactive processes that structure communities is important to mitigate threats to biodiversity. Competition is considered a primary reinforcing process, yet little is known concerning disturbance effects on competitive interaction networks. We examined how differences in ant community composition between undisturbed and disturbed Bornean rainforest, is potentially reflected by changes in competitive interactions over a food resource. Comparing 10 primary forest sites to 10 in selectively-logged forest, we found higher genus richness and diversity in the primary forest, with 18.5% and 13.0% of genera endemic to primary and logged respectively. From 180 hours of filming bait cards,

SUBMITTER: Gray REJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5865194 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature