Responses of ants to environmental stress and disturbance in Australian tropical savannas: Are communities of different vertical strata decoupled?

The impacts of climate change can be both direct, such as through increased aridity, and indirect, such as through altered fire regimes. My project investigates the effects of fire, aridity and their interaction on the ant communities of tropical savannas. Ants are a dominant group in terms of biomass and energy flow globally. There have been several studies on the key
drivers of ant community structure and function, but these have focussed on ground-dwelling species, thus ignoring important components of the ant fauna. It is largely unknown if the responses of subterranean, leaf-litter and arboreal ant communities to environmental variations, such as in fire and aridity, reflect those of ground-dwelling species. Elucidating how the ant communities of all strata respond to fire and aridity is thus crucial to implement fire management for the conservation of ant diversity.