Comparing Ant Assemblages and Functional Groups across Urban Habitats and Seasons in an East Asia Monsoon Climate Area

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Urban green spaces often provide refuges for native biodiversity. In light of human population growth and climate change, this research’s aim was to reveal how ant community structures differed among human-modified habitats. Ant diversity was sensitive to vegetation composition, habitat fragmentation, and seasonal change, while ant functional groups responded differently to these factors, which further enhanced their sensitivity. Therefore, future conservation and monitoring plans for ant diversity should take seasonality, habitat filters, and functional groups into greater consideration. ABSTRACT: China’s East Asia monsoon zone is undergoing rapid land-use conversion and urbanization. Safeguarding remaining biodiversity requires reducing, mitigating, and/or eliminating the negative impacts of human-induced landscape modification. In this study, we sampled ground-dwelling ants at 40 plots over 12 continuous months in a suburban area in southwestern China to examine whether and how vegetation composition and habitat fragmentation affected species richness and assemblage composition for the general ant community and, specifically, for principal functional groups (including Opportunists and Generalized Myrmicinae). Warmer seasons were associated with a higher capture rate for all functional groups. Patterns of ant species richness among Opportunists were more sensitive to vegetation and fragmentation than for Generalized Myrmicinae, and these effects generally varied with season. Patterns of ant assemblage composition for Opportunists were exclusively sensitive to vegetation, whereas Generalized Myrmicinae were sensitive to both vegetation and fragmentation with variation among seasons. Overall, our findings highlight the important role of seasonality, vegetation composition, and habitat fragmentation in mediating the impacts of human-induced landscape modification on urbanized ant communities, which make an essential functional contribution to biodiversity in the East Asia monsoon zone.