Registered users receive a variety of benefits including the ability to customize email alerts, create favorite journals list, and save searches.
Please note that a BioOne web account does not automatically grant access to full-text content. An institutional or society member subscription is required to view non-Open Access content.
Contact helpdesk@bioone.org with any questions.
Nivia da Silva Dias, Ronald Zanetti, Mônica Silva Santos, Maria Fernanda Gomes Villalba Peñaflor, Sônia Maria Forti Broglio, Jacques Hubert Charles Delabie
Ants are known to function as reliable biological indicators for habitat impact assessment. They play a wide range of ecological roles depending on their feeding and nesting habits. By clustering ants in guilds, it is possible both to assess how agriculture and forest fragmentation can disturb ant communities and to predict the ecological impacts due to losses of a specific guild. This study aimed at determining the impact of non-shaded coffee and pasture agriculture on predatory and omnivorous guilds of leaf-litter ants of Atlantic Forest fragments in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Both coffee and pasture agriculture influenced leaf-litter ant community, although coffee was more disruptive than pasture. Coffee agriculture not only disturbed the diversity of predatory ants, but also negatively affected the number of predatory and omnivorous ants when compared to forest fragments. In contrast, pasture agriculture only disrupted the abundance of predatory ants. Fragment edges skirting crops were negatively affected in terms of leaf-litter ant abundance, but not diversity. Cluster analysis showed that forest fragments were similar irrespective of the cultivation, but the borders were similar to the crop. The study assessed agriculture impact by surveying ant guilds, and revealed that the predatory guild is more susceptible than omnivorous ants.
This article is only available to subscribers. It is not available for individual sale.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have
purchased or subscribe to this BioOne eBook Collection. You are receiving
this notice because your organization may not have this eBook access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users-please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
Additional information about institution subscriptions can be foundhere