Pine plantations in south eastern Australia support highly impoverished ant assemblages (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

A comparison of the leaf-litter ant fauna in a secondary atlantic forest with an adjacent pine plantation in southeastern Brazil

“…These resources are less accessible in monocultures, especially in areas covered by Pinus, by virtue of the allelopathic effects caused by the pine needles that form exclusively the understorey, composed of fatty acids, terpenes and a variety of phenols, preventing the regeneration of native plants. As a result of these allelopathic effects, pine plantations tend to have extremely simplifi ed understorey (Corley et al 2006), reduced microhabitat diversity and relatively high environmental uniformity (Sinclair & New 2004).…”

“…Previous studies have described how afforestation methods using a single tree species can have a marked negative effect on ant species richness and composition (Majer & Recher 1999Watt et al 2002; the reduction in ant diversity that occurs when original forests are replaced by monocultures has also been verifi ed in Brazil (Oliveira et al 1995, Tavares et al 2001, Marinho et al 2002. In the pine tree forests of the Patagonian steppe (Corley et al 2006) or south eastern Australia (Sinclair & New 2004), ant abundance within pine plantations is lower and species composition signifi cantly impoverished when compared to more pristine habitats. Ant diversity in tropical forest declines strongly with structural simplifi cation of the vegetation because the regional ant fauna consists largely of forest-habitat specialists (Brühl et al 2003).…”

“…These species can represent forest-adapted species that do not tolerate altered microclimate resulting from habitat modifi cation. Therefore, many of the ecologically more specialized ants are eliminated locally by the processes of forest clearing and plantation establishment, leaving a more generalist set which is suffi ciently tolerant to persist in the altered plantation conditions (Sinclair & New 2004).…”

“…Nevertheless, the alterations imposed on invertebrate communities through afforestation with fastgrowing trees have not been fully described yet (Gunther & New 2003, Sinclair & New 2004, Corley et al 2006. This is especially true for areas covered by Atlantic rain forest, one of the most threatened tropical ecosystems in the world.…”

Arthropods as bioindicators of sustainable forest management, with a focus on plantation forests

“…Ants have been extensively used as effective disturbance bioindicators for ecosystem management and biodiversity restoration (Underwood and Fisher, 2006) with respect to their eco-functional importance (Gauld and Bolton, 1988) and high sensitivity to ecosystem disturbances caused by forest thinning, grazing, species invasion, forest fires, forest conversion, forest fragmentation, and other forms of disturbance (Carvalho and Vasconcelos, 1999;Vasconcelos et al, 2000;Maeto and Sato, 2004;Sinclair and New, 2004;Stephens and Wagner, 2006).…”