Strong and weak environmental perturbations cause contrasting restructure of ant transportation networks

Dynamic transportation networks are embedded in all levels of biological organisation. Ever-growing anthropogenic disturbances and an increasingly variable climate highlight the importance of understanding how these networks restructure under environmental perturbations. Polydomous wood ants provide a convenient model system to study the resilience of self-organising multi-source multi-sink transportation networks. We used ten years of longitudinal empirical data on both unperturbed and experimentally manipulated colony networks to develop and validate a comprehensive dynamic simulation model to study network restructuring after resource removal. We performed simulation experiments to study the effects of excluding food sources with varying importance, either temporarily or permanently, imitating pulse and press perturbations of the networks. We found that removing heavily used resources, corresponding to a strong targeted perturbation, persistently decreased network efficiency, unlike ..., Methods: How was this dataset collected?
This dataset was collected from a long-term study on nine polydomous wood ant (Formica lugubris) colony networks at Longshaw Estate, Peak District, UK (N53°18’33”, E1°36’96”), spanning the period 2012–2021. Colony mapping followed the protocol of Ellis & Robinson (2015) and was conducted annually in late summer (July–August), coinciding with peak ant activity.
Data collection involved:

Nest and Foraging Mapping: Actively used nests and the trees they foraged on were recorded.

Trail Measurement:  Internest and foraging trail lengths were measured, and trail strength was assessed by recording the distance required to count ten ants at the midpoint of each trail. This recorded distance was then converted into ants per millimeter (ants/mm) for further analysis.

Nest Population Estimation: The mound-volume technique (Chen & Robinson, 2013) was used to estimate nest sizes.

Previous Empirical Perturbation Experiment (2017–2021): Five c..., , # Strong and weak environmental perturbations cause contrasting restructure of ant transportation networks

The original empirical data used in this study, including network edges and nodes, is available for direct download as *empirical_edges.csv* and *empirical_nodes.csv* within the uploaded files and is also contained in *Ant_networks_Code_and_Data.zip* (see the 'Input' folder inside the ZIP file). A detailed description of all uploaded data, code, and results is listed below.

The study aims to improve our understanding of the structural changes happening in multi-sink multi-source transport networks in response to environmental perturbations. We designed to model to accurately describe the structure, dynamics, and perturbation responses of wood ant (*Formica lugubris*) colony networks.

We provide a complete, detailed model description, following the ODD (Overview, Design concepts, Details) protocol [1–3] in the Supplementary Material document.

The project is implemented in R 4.2....