DOI: 10.5061/dryad.83bk3j9sk
title: Rapid ant community re-assembly in a Neotropical forest: recovery dynamics and land-use legacy

description: 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 compositional and trait structure similarity to old-growth
 forest communities increased with regeneration age, whereas ant species
 richness remained always at a high level along the chronosequence.
 Land-use legacies influenced species composition, with former cacao
 plantations showing higher resemblance to old-growth forests than former
 pastures along the chronosequence. While resistance was low for species
 composition and high for species richness and traits, all community
 properties had similarly high resilience. In essence, our results show
 that ant communities of the Chocó recovery rapidly, with former cacao
 reaching predicted old-growth forest community levels after 21 years and
 pastures after 29 years. Recovery in this community was faster than
 reported from other ecosystems and was likely facilitated by the
 low-intensity farming in agricultural sites and their proximity to
 old-growth forest remnants. Our study indicates the great recovery
 potential for this otherwise highly threatened biodiversity hotspot.
description: This data sets contains the raw data and R-script associated with
 our research article. It contains ant collection data in a chronosequence
 in Ecuador, as well as measurements of the ant traits. 
 Ants were collected with standardized methods of Winkler (W),
 handsampling on the ground (HS) and handsampling on tree trunks (T) from
 61 plots. The methods were pooled on plot-level and represent occurences
 (=presence/absence) of ant species. Our files include metadata on the
 plots (e.g., coordinates), but also a list of the collected ant species
 and the number of occurences in each habitat type. Detailed descriptions
 of the sampling protocols, plot selection and statistical analysis are
 found in the associated paper.  The ant traits were
 measured from individuals collected in our study site. A description of
 trait abbreviations can be found in our R-script. The
 R-script is annotated and describes our statistical procedures and used
 R-packages, and contains also descriptive information
 on the csv.-files.