Rapid ant community re-assembly in a Neotropical forest: recovery dynamics and land-use legacy

Regrowing secondary forests dominate tropical regions today, and a mechanistic understanding of their recovery dynamics provides important insights for conservation. In particular, land-use legacy effects on the fauna have rarely been investigated. One of the most ecologically dominant and functionally important animal groups in tropical forests are ants. Here, we investigated the recovery of ant communities in a forest – agricultural habitat mosaic in the Ecuadorian Chocó region. We used a replicated chronosequence of previously used cacao plantations and pastures with 1 – 34 years of regeneration time to study the recovery dynamics of species communities and functional diversity across the two land use legacies. We compared two independent components of responses on these community properties: resistance, which is measured as the proportion of an initial property that remains following the disturbance; and resilience, which is the rate of recovery relative to its loss. We found that c...