Abstract
Fire-suppression is of concern in fire-prone ecosystems because it can result in the loss of endemic species. Suppressing fires also causes a build-up of flammable biomass, increasing the risk of severe fires. Using a Before-After, Control-Impacted design, we assessed the consequences of high-severity fires on Neotropical savanna arboreal ant communities. Over a 9-year period, we sampled the ant fauna of the same trees before and after two severe fires that hit a savanna reserve in Brazil and the trees from an unburned savanna site that served as a temporal control. The ant community associated with the unburned trees was relatively stable, with no significant temporal variation in species richness and only a few species changing in abundance over time. In contrast, we found a strong decline in species richness and marked changes in species composition in the burned trees, with some species becoming more prevalent and many becoming rare or locally extinct. The dissimilarity in species richness and composition was significantly smaller between the two pre-fire surveys than between the pre- and post-fire surveys. Fire-induced changes were much more marked among species with strictly arboreal nesting habits, and therefore more susceptible to the direct effects of fire. The decline of some of the ecologically dominant arboreal ant species may be particularly important, as it opens substantial ecological space for cascading community-wide changes. In particular, severe fires appear to disrupt the typical vertical stratification between the arboreal and ground-dwelling faunas, which might lead to homogenization of the overall ant community.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Brazilian Council of Research and Scientific Development (CNPq Grants 457407/2012-3 and 441225/2016-0), The Research Support Foundation of the Minas Gerais state (FAPEMIG—APQ 03202-13, and 04815-17), and the National Science Foundation (Awards DEB 0842144, and 1442256) for funding this research, and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) for the M.Sc. scholarship granted to T.F.R. We also thank Renata Pacheco and Karen Neves for their help with ant identifications, Jésica Vieira and Elmo Borges for their help with the field and/or laboratory work, and an anonymous reviewer for commenting on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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SP, HLV, FC and TFR conceived the ideas and designed methodology; TFR, FC, LAZ, RT, JBM, SP and HLV collected the data; TFR and HLV analyzed the data; TFR and HLV led the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed critically to the drafts and gave final approval for publication.
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Communicated by Konrad Fiedler .
This study provides evidence that in the absence of fires over 8–9 years, the highly diverse and ecologically important arboreal ant community of Neotropical savannas remains relatively stable. Fires of high severity, in contrast, cause a sharp decline in ant diversity and potentially disrupt the typical vertical stratification between the arboreal and ground-dwelling ant faunas.
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Rosa, T.F., Camarota, F., Zuanon, L.A. et al. The effects of high-severity fires on the arboreal ant community of a Neotropical savanna. Oecologia 196, 951–961 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04922-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04922-x