Anthropogenic disturbance and rainfall variation threaten the stability of plant‐ant interactions in the Brazilian Caatinga

Climate change is projected to exacerbate the effects of anthropogenic disturbance, with negative impacts on ecosystem stability and functioning. We evaluate the additive and combined effects of chronic anthropogenic disturbance (CAD) and rainfall variation on the temporal stability of mutualistic EFN‐bearing plant‐ant networks in a Caatinga dry forest. We evaluated whether changes in the stability of these interactions are driven by changes in the stability of the communities of partners involved and/or in ant behavior. We sampled EFN‐bearing plant‐ant networks in sixteen 20m×20m plots distributed across CAD and rainfall gradients. The stability of EFN‐bearing plant and attendant‐ant communities were measured as the inverse of temporal differences in their community structure and composition. We also computed the stability of EFN‐bearing plant‐ant networks by measuring the inverse of temporal differences in network specialization metrics. We found that, in general, the structure and co...