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A recent study led by Sam Ross and published in the journal Biotropica, asks how selective logging interacts with habitat fragmentation to affect ant biodiversity in a Kenyan rainforest. Read more in the blog post snippet below, or see the full blog post on the IMECO blog:
“Our recent study asks how selective logging intensity affects ant biodiversity in Kakamega forest in Western Kenya. Building on fieldwork conducted by Paco Hita Garcia and Georg Fischer ~10 years ago, we aimed to uncover how logging intensity in the past and recently interacts with habitat fragmentation to affect ant communities. We found that recent selective logging matters the most, and that ant species that lived mainly in the forest were particularly affected by logging. Our work reveals how recent logging activity may overshadow any historic impacts in this forest in Kenya.
Ants matter
Ants are a really important part of most terrestrial ecosystems. They form a large proportion of insect biomass. They also have remarkable diversity, including a range of trophic positions in the community; that is, some ants are herbivores whilst some eat other ants. The presence and diversity of ants has also been shown to give a pretty good picture of how ‘healthy’ an ecosystem is, which we call being an ‘ecological indicator’. So, we can use ants to reveal the negative impacts we humans have on ecosystems…”
Read the full blog post on the IMECO blog.
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About the Author
Sam Ross is a PhD student in Ian Donohue’s research group in the Department of Zoology, Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on the effects of global change on ecological stability. Find out more about his research here:
Website | https://srpjr.wordpress.com/
Twitter | @SamRPJRoss
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ORCID | 0000-0001-9402-9119