Rachmansah Angga, Christian Keith, Murphy Brett P, Schlesinger Christine, Andersen Alan N
Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods Charles Darwin University Brinkin Northern Territory Australia.
Ecol Evol. 2025 Mar 6;15(3):e70939. doi: 10.1002/ece3.70939. eCollection 2025 Mar.
Disturbance is fundamental to the state and dynamics of biological communities, and understanding biotic responses to disturbance is critical to effective biodiversity conservation. However, a predictive understanding of how faunal communities respond to habitat disturbance remains elusive. Recently, a conceptual framework centred on habitat openness was developed for understanding ant responses to disturbance. It proposes that habitat openness is a fundamental driver of variation among ant communities, and that the primary impacts of disturbance are mediated through ant functional responses to changes in openness. Like ants, terrestrial reptiles are ectotherms and are therefore especially sensitive to disturbance-induced increases in habitat openness because of changes in the thermal environment. Therefore, reptiles might also be expected to conform to a disturbance framework based on habitat openness. Here we assess the extent to which this occurs by combining a quantitative analysis of recent publications with a broader synthesis of the literature. We found strong support for the framework applying to terrestrial reptiles. We suggest that the framework can be strengthened by a mechanistic understanding of functional traits in relation to habitat openness. For ectotherms, ecophysiological traits could be particularly important for responding to disturbance-mediated changes in microclimate, but habitat openness also influences other important factors such as food availability and predation. Finally, the framework appears to be highly applicable to a wider range of faunal groups beyond ants and reptiles.
干扰是生物群落状态和动态的基本要素，了解生物对干扰的反应对于有效的生物多样性保护至关重要。然而，对于动物群落如何应对栖息地干扰的预测性理解仍然难以捉摸。最近，一个以栖息地开阔度为核心的概念框架被开发出来，用于理解蚂蚁对干扰的反应。该框架提出，栖息地开阔度是蚂蚁群落间差异的一个基本驱动因素，干扰的主要影响是通过蚂蚁对开阔度变化的功能反应来介导的。与蚂蚁一样，陆生爬行动物是变温动物，因此由于热环境的变化，它们对干扰引起的栖息地开阔度增加特别敏感。因此，爬行动物可能也符合基于栖息地开阔度的干扰框架。在这里，我们通过结合对近期出版物的定量分析和对文献的更广泛综合，来评估这种情况发生的程度。我们发现该框架适用于陆生爬行动物，得到了有力支持。我们建议，通过对与栖息地开阔度相关的功能性状进行机制性理解，可以加强该框架。对于变温动物来说，生态生理性状对于应对干扰介导的小气候变化可能尤为重要，但栖息地开阔度也会影响其他重要因素，如食物供应和捕食。最后，该框架似乎高度适用于除蚂蚁和爬行动物之外的更广泛的动物类群。
