RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Breakdown in seasonal dynamics of ant communities with land-cover change
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2023.01.17.523860
DO 10.1101/2023.01.17.523860
A1 Jamie M. Kass
A1 Masashi Yoshimura
A1 Masako Ogasawara
A1 Mayuko Suwabe
A1 Francisco Hita Garcia
A1 Georg Fischer
A1 Kenneth L. Dudley
A1 Ian Donohue
A1 Evan P. Economo
YR 2023
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/01/22/2023.01.17.523860.abstract
AB Concerns about widespread human-induced declines in insect populations are mounting, yet little is known about how land-use change modifies the dynamics of insect communities, particularly in understudied biomes. Here we examine how the seasonal patterns of ant activity, key drivers of ecosystem functioning, vary with human-induced land cover change on a subtropical island landscape. Using trap captures sampled biweekly from a biodiversity monitoring network covering Okinawa Island, Japan, we processed 1.2 million individuals and reconstructed activity patterns within and across habitat types. We determined that communities inside the forest exhibited more variability than those in more developed areas. Using time-series decomposition to deconstruct this pattern, we found that ant communities at sites with greater human development exhibited diminished seasonality, reduced synchrony, and higher stochasticity compared to those at sites with greater forest cover. We demonstrate that our results cannot be explained by variation in either regional or in situ temperature patterns, or by differences in species richness or composition among sites. We conclude that the breakdown of natural seasonal patterns of functionally key insect communities may comprise an important and underappreciated consequence of global environmental change that must be better understood across Earth’s biomes.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.