Data from: The arboreal ants of a Neotropical rainforest show high species density and comprise one third of the ant fauna

In tropical rainforests, the ant community can be divided into ground and
arboreal faunas. Here we report a thorough sampling of the arboreal ant
fauna of La Selva Biological Station, a Neotropical rainforest site.
Forty-five canopy fogging samples were centered around large trees.
Individual samples harbored an average of 35 ant species, with up to 55
species in a single sample. The fogging samples yielded 163 observed
species total, out of a statistically estimated 199 species. We found no
relationship between within-sample ant richness and focal tree species,
nor were the ant faunas of nearby trees more similar to each other than
the faunas of widely spaced trees. Species density was high and beta
diversity was low: a single column of vegetation typically harbors at
least a fifth of the entire arboreal ant fauna. Considering the entire
fauna, based on 23,326 species occurrence records using a wide variety of
collecting methods, 182 of 539 observed species (196 of 605, estimated
statistically) were entirely arboreal. The arboreal ant fauna is thus
about a third of the total La Selva ant fauna, a robust result because
inventory completeness was similar for ground and arboreal ants. The
taxonomic history of discovery of the species that make up the La Selva
fauna reveals no disproportionately large pool of undiscovered ant species
in the canopy. The "last biotic frontier" for tropical ants has
been the rotten wood, leaf litter, and soil of the forest floor.