Termite communities along a disturbance gradient in a West African savanna release_5c7yudply5bm5l2syubaveoih4

by Janine Schyra, Judith Korb

Released as a post by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

2017  

Abstract

Termites are important ecosystem engineers, crucial for the maintenance of tropical biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. But they are also pests which cause billions of dollars in damage annually to humans. Currently, our understanding of the mechanisms influencing species occurrences is limited and we do not know what distinguishes pest from non-pest species. We analyzed how anthropogenic disturbance (agriculture) affects species occurrences. We tested the hypothesis that strong disturbance functions as a habitat filter and selects for a subset of species which are major pests of crop. Using a cross-sectional approach, we studied termite community composition along a disturbance gradient from fields to 12-year-old fallows in a West African savanna. We reliably identified 19 species using genetic markers with a mean of about 10 species - many of them from the same feeding type - co-occurring locally. Supporting our hypothesis, disturbance was associated with environmental filtering of termites from the regional species pool, maybe via its effect on vegetation type. The most heavily disturbed sites were characterized by a subset of termite species which are well-known pests of crop. This is in line with the idea that strong anthropogenic disturbance selects for termite pest species.
In application/xml+jats format

Archived Files and Locations

application/pdf  720.0 kB
file_4vorgwpikrfmhpdfv7druhcdfy
web.archive.org (webarchive)
www.biorxiv.org (web)
application/pdf  721.8 kB
file_3wkijkowarf37cauxt6vga2guy
web.archive.org (webarchive)
www.biorxiv.org (web)
Read Archived PDF
Preserved and Accessible
Type  post
Stage   unknown
Date   2017-07-24
Work Entity
access all versions, variants, and formats of this works (eg, pre-prints)
Catalog Record
Revision: ae82f88f-d21e-4924-a857-c91100fdbc78
API URL: JSON