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 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.
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30 August 2020
Unfortunately, the given and family names of author ���Mickal Houadria��� was incorrectly published in the original.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to all the landholders who kindly allowed sampling to be conducted on their farms and in their gardens, to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and to Andrea Dejean for proof-reading this manuscript. Financial support for this study was provided by a PhD fellowship from the LabEx CEBA (Centre d’Etude de la Biodiversité Amazonienne) and the Fond Social Européen (FSE) to ASL by a ‘‘Investissement d’Avenir’’ grant managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (CEBA, ref. ANR-10- LABX-25-01) and by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, ref. ME 3842/1-1).
Author contribution statement
All of the authors conceived the experiment. ASL performed the experiment, and analyzed the data. All of the authors significantly contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
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Salas-Lopez, A., Mickal, H., Menzel, F. et al. Ant-mediated ecosystem processes are driven by trophic community structure but mainly by the environment. Oecologia 183, 249–261 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3741-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3741-z