Ecological Networks, Department of Biology, Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany.
Departamento de Biología, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito, Ecuador.
Ecol Appl. 2022 Jun;32(4):e2559. doi: 10.1002/eap.2559. Epub 2022 May 3.
Regrowing secondary forests dominate tropical regions today, and a mechanistic understanding of their recovery dynamics provides important insights for conservation. In particular, land-use legacy effects on the fauna have rarely been investigated. One of the most ecologically dominant and functionally important animal groups in tropical forests are the ants. Here, we investigated the recovery of ant communities in a forest-agricultural habitat mosaic in the Ecuadorian Chocó region. We used a replicated chronosequence of previously used cacao plantations and pastures with 1-34 years of regeneration time to study the recovery dynamics of species communities and functional diversity across the two land-use legacies. We compared two independent components of responses on these community properties: resistance, which is measured as the proportion of an initial property that remains following the disturbance; and resilience, which is the rate of recovery relative to its loss. We found that compositional and trait structure similarity to old-growth forest communities increased with regeneration age, whereas ant species richness remained always at a high level along the chronosequence. Land-use legacies influenced species composition, with former cacao plantations showing higher resemblance to old-growth forests than former pastures along the chronosequence. While resistance was low for species composition and high for species richness and traits, all community properties had similarly high resilience. In essence, our results show that ant communities of the Chocó recovery rapidly, with former cacao reaching predicted old-growth forest community levels after 21 years and pastures after 29 years. Recovery in this community was faster than reported from other ecosystems and was likely facilitated by the low-intensity farming in agricultural sites and their proximity to old-growth forest remnants. Our study indicates the great recovery potential for this otherwise highly threatened biodiversity hotspot.
次生林如今占据着热带地区的主导地位，对其恢复动态的机制理解为保护工作提供了重要的见解。特别是，土地利用对动物区系的遗留效应很少被研究过。在热带森林中，最具生态优势和功能重要的动物群体之一是蚂蚁。在这里，我们调查了厄瓜多尔乔科地区森林-农业生境镶嵌体中蚂蚁群落的恢复情况。我们使用了以前使用过的可可种植园和牧场的复制时间序列，这些种植园和牧场的再生时间为 1-34 年，以研究物种群落和功能多样性在这两种土地利用遗产中的恢复动态。我们比较了这两个社区属性的两个独立的响应成分：抵抗力，它是指在受到干扰后保持初始属性的比例；以及弹性，它是相对于损失的恢复速度。我们发现，与旧生长林群落的组成和特征结构相似性随着再生年龄的增加而增加，而蚂蚁物种丰富度在整个时间序列中始终保持在较高水平。土地利用遗产影响物种组成，与老林相比，以前的可可种植园在时间序列上与老林的相似性更高，而以前的牧场则更高。虽然物种组成的抵抗力较低，而物种丰富度和特征的抵抗力较高，但所有社区属性的弹性都相似较高。本质上，我们的结果表明，乔科地区的蚂蚁群落恢复迅速，以前的可可在 21 年后达到预测的老生长林群落水平，而牧场在 29 年后达到。与其他生态系统相比，这种恢复速度更快，这可能是由于农业用地的低强度耕作及其与老生长林残余物的接近。我们的研究表明，对于这个否则受到高度威胁的生物多样性热点地区，存在巨大的恢复潜力。
