Efeitos da conversão dos usos do solo sobre a diversidade de formigas e função de predação de insetos

Abstract

Land use change is one of the main drivers of the loss of global biodiversity. Regarding biodiversity, Brazil holds a large part of the important species and ecosystems to the world. In addition, recently, concerns about biodiversity losses and threats to these ecosystems have intensified. In this sense, we see an increase of studies in order to understand such effects on natural habitats, and among them, the ants are shown as a great tool due to their high diversity, high abundance in terrestrial ecosystems and to their sensitivity to anthropic impacts. Thus, in this dissertation, our objective is to respond to the effects of land use change to the assembly ants and ecological functions. For this, the dissertation is divided into two articles where in the first (1) we carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis (meta-analysis) to understand the types of studies that are being carried out and the general effects found in relation to the effects of land use under ants assembly, and in the second article (2) we carried out a case study on the conversion of the Amazon Rainforest to agricultural itinerant (swidden) and pasture in the diversity and predation function of ants. We found that, in general, land uses change in Brazil have harmant diversity, however these studies are concentrated in few biomes (e.g. Amazon Rainforest, Cerrado and Atlantic Forest) and evaluated mostly the responses of the community structure (e.g. composition and diversity), which highlights a gap in knowledge about other biomes and ecological parameters to be analyzed. It was also found that the conversion of the Amazon Rainforest to swidden and pasture has negative effects for the ant diversity, but positive effects in insect predation, despite the effects on the quality of the predation, which are not yet known. To conclude, we suggest future studies should evaluate the effects of land use change in the assembly of ants in the Caatinga, Pampa and Pantanal biomes and that evaluate parameters on the functional ecology for the best comprehension of land use effects on biodiversity.