The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth

@article{Schultheiss2022TheAB, title={The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth}, author={Patrick Schultheiss and Sabine S. Nooten and Runxi Wang and Mark K. L. Wong and François Brassard and Benoit Guénard}, journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America}, year={2022}, volume={119}, url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:252381912} }
This global map of ant abundance expands the understanding of the geography of ant diversity and provides a baseline for predicting ants’ responses to worrying environmental changes that currently impact insect biomass.
View PDF
168 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
3
Background Citations
23
Methods Citations
1
Results Citations
1

168 Citations

Improving estimates of global ant biomass and abundance

This work gathers most of the literature to date on ground-dwelling ant abundances in the leaf litter on Earth and scales ant abundance values from over 26,800 m of leaf litter up to the level of individual biomes and habitat types, resulting in greatly improved estimates for global ant abundance and biomass.

The global biomass and number of terrestrial arthropods

This work synthesized thousands of evaluations from around 500 sites worldwide, estimating the absolute biomass and abundance of terrestrial arthropods across different taxa and habitats to provide an initial holistic benchmark on their decline.

Global diversity and energy of animals shaping the Earth’s surface

It is conservatively estimated that wild animal species collectively contribute ≈76,000 GJ energy or more to geomorphic processes annually, equivalent to the energy expended by hundreds of thousands of extreme floods.

Global engineering effects of soil invertebrates on ecosystem functions

The biogenic structures produced by termites, ants and earthworms provide key functions across global ecosystems1,2. However, little is known about the drivers of the soil engineering effects caused…

Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad

This research shows that ants could optimize their nutrient intake, enabling them to survive efficiently even when facing disturbances, instead of increasing dominance.

Testing a Hump-Shaped Pattern with Increasing Elevation for Ant Species Richness in Daliang Mountain, Sichuan, China

The results indicated that ground-foraging ant species were the most abundant in this region and that ants prefer to nest in the soil, and the importance of elevation in influencing ant species richness in Daliang Mountain, Sichuan, China, is highlighted.

Ant invasion is associated with lower root density and different root distribution of a foundational savanna tree species

The results suggest that soil-nesting invasive ants can drive important changes in rooting strategy for a tree species that serves a foundational role in the biogeochemical cycles of vertisol savannas.

Induced drought strongly affects richness and composition of ground-dwelling ants in the eastern Amazon

Induced drought reduced ant richness, whereas increased soil moisture and variability in tree biomass increased it, and species composition differed between control and rainfall-excluded plots.

Ants from the tropical dry forest in the Cauca River geographic valley, Colombia: new records and expansion of distributions

This research compared ant diversity between two habitat types, tropical dry forest fragments and the surrounding matrices in the Cauca River Valley region to study the effects of land-use changes and assessing ecosystem quality.

Induced drought in an Amazonian forest affects diversity but not foraging distance of generalist ants

It is concluded that the extremely high diversity of tropical forest ants may be able to buffer the detrimental effects of drought on the resource detection rates of generalist ants.
...

127 References

Explaining the Abundance of Ants in Lowland Tropical Rainforest Canopies

It is found that many arboreal ant species obtain little N through predation and scavenging, and microsymbionts of ants and their hemipteran trophobionts might play key roles in the nutrition of taxa specializing on N-poor exudates.

The biomass distribution on Earth

The overall biomass composition of the biosphere is assembled, establishing a census of the ≈550 gigatons of carbon (Gt C) of biomass distributed among all of the kingdoms of life and shows that terrestrial biomass is about two orders of magnitude higher than marine biomass and estimate a total of ≈6 Gt C of marine biota, doubling the previous estimated quantity.

Global distribution of earthworm diversity

A global dataset of sampled earthworm communities from over 7000 sites in 56 countries is compiled to predict patterns in earthworm diversity, abundance, and biomass, and the environmental drivers shaping these patterns are identified.

Soil nematode abundance and functional group composition at a global scale

High-resolution spatial maps of the global abundance of soil nematodes and the composition of functional groups show that soil nem atodes are found in higher abundances in sub-Arctic regions, than in temperate or tropical regions.

Global ant (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) biodiversity and biogeography - a new database and its possibilities

A global database for the diversity of ants, perhaps the best-studied of ecologically important insect taxa, is developed and the possibility of testing general macroecological theory with an Ecologically important group of insects is offered.

Insect diversity: facts, fiction and speculation*

    N. Stork
    Biology, Environmental Science
  • 1988
Assessment of the faunal importance of the canopy in relation to that of other rain forest biotopes requires comparative quantitative studies, and the preliminary results of one such study suggest that over 42 million arthropods may be found in a hectare of Seram rain forest.

Defaunation in the Anthropocene

Defaunation is both a pervasive component of the planet’s sixth mass extinction and also a major driver of global ecological change.

The future of hyperdiverse tropical ecosystems

The immense biodiversity of tropical ecosystems is threatened by multiple interacting local and global stressors that can only be addressed by the concerted efforts of grassroots organizations, researchers, national governments and the international community.

How Many Species of Insects and Other Terrestrial Arthropods Are There on Earth?

With 1 million insect species named, this suggests that 80% remain to be discovered and that a greater focus should be placed on less-studied taxa such as many families of Coleoptera, Diptera, and Hymenoptera and on poorly sampled parts of the world.

Energy and Large-Scale Patterns of Animal- and Plant-Species Richness

It is found that, in the four vertebrate classes studied, 80%-93% of the variability in species richness could be statistically explained by a monotonically increasing function of a single variable: annual potential evapotranspiration (PET).
...