| Bishop, Tom R. and Zammit, Alana 2026. Functional and phylogenetic change in ant communities across elevational gradients: Informing impacts of climate change. Leal, I.R., Oliveira, F.M.P, Arnan, X. and Andersen, A.N., eds. Ant Responses to Climate Change, Switzerland: Springer Nature, pp. 187-207. (10.1007/978-3-032-21127-9_10) |
Abstract
Elevational gradients represent some of the most diverse and challenging environments on our planet. As well as hosting a large fraction of Earth’s endemic species and providing crucial ecosystem services to human civilisation, elevational gradients are likely to act as important climate refugia into the twenty-first century. Consequently, understanding how ecological communities are distributed across them today is a key goal of both basic ecology and attempts to understand the response of organisms to climate change. In this chapter, we explore the ant communities of elevational gradients via a systematic literature review. Patterns of species richness have already been well documented, and so we focus on functional and phylogenetic changes in these communities. Ultimately, species live in different environments based on the physiological, morphological, or behavioural traits that they possess or by virtue of their evolutionary history. Consequently, functional and phylogenetic perspectives have much to tell us about biodiversity patterns. We reveal a large bias towards functional trait studies in the ant-elevational literature, with only a limited number focussing on phylogenetic change. Further, these trait-based studies are focussed on thermal tolerance, morphology, and size changes. Overall, because ant communities at high elevation are adapted to cold environments, they display a limited range of morphological diversity, have greater tolerance to the cold, and come from a limited subset of the ant phylogeny—typically genera within the subfamilies Formicinae and Myrmicinae. Exploiting these trait-environment or phylogeny-environment relationships forms the basis of our ability to predict future montane ant communities under altered climates. Despite these findings, there are key areas that ant-elevational studies have ignored to date: incorporating functional and phylogenetic perspectives simultaneously, engaging fully with how functional metrics or measured traits relate to the environment, and exploiting the use of time-series to better contextualise our understanding of climate change responses. In sum, while we have a picture of how broad functional and phylogenetic diversity changes with elevation, more targeted approaches are needed to leverage this research to the benefit of climate change evaluation and prediction.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > Biosciences |
| Publisher: | Springer Nature |
| ISBN: | 9783032211262 |
| ISSN: | 2405-853X |
| Last Modified: | 12 Aug 2026 11:00 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/188942 |
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