Determining how the thermal tolerances of species are related to climatic conditions at multiple spatial scales can improve our understanding of species distributions and their vulnerability to climate change. We compare the warming tolerances—a metric of warming vulnerability—of arboreal and ground‐dwelling ants from savanna and adjacent semideciduous forest in Brazil's Cerrado. Warming tolerance was estimated using the diffe...

Motivation The accelerated and widespread conversion of once continuous ecosystems into fragmented landscapes has driven ecological research to understand the response of biodiversity to local (fragment size) and landscape (forest cover and fragmentation) changes. This information has important theoretical and applied implications, but is still far from complete. We compiled the most comprehensive and updated database to inves...

Aim Arboreal and ground‐dwelling species experience distinct microclimates, have contrasting thermal tolerances and thus may be expected to respond differentially to geographic climatic gradients. We tested this idea by evaluating if the degree of vertical stratification of savanna ant assemblages varies along a latitudinal climatic gradient, and by determining how compositional dissimilarities within each stratum varies acros...

Most comparative studies of biological communities in different biogeographical regions highlight ecological convergence under matched environments. Here we use savanna ant communities as a striking example where such convergence has not occurred. The savanna ant faunas of Australia, Brazil and Africa have very different functional composition due to their highly contrasting evolutionary origins.We synthesise the literature re...

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America. The ATLANTIC ANTS data set, which...

Herbivory is ubiquitous. Despite being a potential driver of plant distribution and performance, herbivory remains largely undocumented. Some early attempts have been made to review, globally, how much leaf area is removed through insect feeding. Kozlov et al., in one of the most comprehensive reviews regarding global patterns of herbivory, have compiled published studies regarding foliar removal and sampled data on global her...

Aim Similar to species richness, ecological interactions can vary across latitudinal and environmental gradients. Knowing the patterns and drivers of such variation could help us to better understand the role of species interactions in maintaining biodiversity. In this study, we analysed the macroecological patterns of the structure and interaction beta diversity of interaction networks involving trees and ants. Location Twent...

The relationship between levels of dominance and species richness is highly contentious, especially in ant communities. The dominance‐impoverishment rule states that high levels of dominance only occur in species‐poor communities, but there appear to be many cases of high levels of dominance in highly diverse communities. The extent to which dominant species limit local richness through competitive exclusion remains unclear, b...

One of the greatest current challenges to human society is ensuring adequate food production and security for a rapidly growing population under changing climatic conditions. Climate change, and specifically rising temperatures, will alter the suitability of areas for specific crops and cultivation systems. In order to maintain yields, farmers may be forced to change cultivation practices, the timing of cultivation, or even th...

Aim To evaluate the extent to which ant species richness in Neotropical savannas varies with macrogeographic variables, and to identify the potential climatic drivers of such variation. Location The Cerrado savanna biome of central Brazil, in a region spanning ca. 20° of latitude and 18°of longitude. Methods Standardized sampling of the arboreal and ground‐dwelling faunas was performed in 29 well‐preserved savanna sites using...

Leafcutter ants propagate co‐evolving fungi for food. The nearly 50 species of leafcutter ants ( Atta , Acromyrmex ) range from Argentina to the United States, with the greatest species diversity in southern South America. We elucidate the biogeography of fungi cultivated by leafcutter ants using DNA sequence and microsatellite‐marker analyses of 474 cultivars collected across the leafcutter range. Fungal cultivars belong to t...

What forces structure ecological assemblages? A key limitation to general insights about assemblage structure is the availability of data that are collected at a small spatial grain (local assemblages) and a large spatial extent (global coverage). Here, we present published and unpublished data from 51 ,388 ant abundance and occurrence records of more than 2,693 species and 7,953 morphospecies from local assemblages collected...

How environmental contexts shape the strength of species interactions, and their influence on community structure, remains a key focus for the field of community ecology. In particular, the extent to which local competitive interactions impact community structure, and whether this differs across contexts, persists as a general issue that is unresolved across a broad range of animal systems. Studies of arboreal ants have shown...