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Article

Bringing Fire Back: How Prescribed Fires Shape Ant Communities in a Fire-Suppressed Neotropical Savanna

by
Ruthe E. O. S. Leão
1,*,
Karen C. F. Neves
1,
Lino A. Zuanon
1,
Giselda Durigan
2 and
Heraldo L. Vasconcelos
1
1
Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU), Uberlândia 38405-302, Minas Gerais, Brazil
2
Floresta Estadual de Assis, Instituto de Pesquisas Ambientais, Assis 19800-970, São Paulo, Brazil
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Diversity 2025, 17(4), 276; https://doi.org/10.3390/d17040276
Submission received: 17 March 2025 / Revised: 7 April 2025 / Accepted: 8 April 2025 / Published: 15 April 2025
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Abstract

:
We evaluated the effects of different fire regimes on the ground-ant community from a savanna (Cerrado) reserve in southern Brazil, where a process of woody encroachment has been taking place. Ants are a dominant faunal group in tropical savannas. Over ~8 years, experimental plots were protected from fire or burned every one or two years. An additional treatment (adaptive) included annual fires and a reduction in woody biomass to increase fuel loads. Ants were collected prior to the first prescribed fire and again four times. We expected that fire would increase the diversity and overall abundance of open-savanna ant specialists, depending on the extent of changes in vegetation structure. Changes in litter depth, grass cover and bare ground in burned plots were most evident 88 months after the first fire and did not differ between fire regimes. Similarly, overall ant species richness and occurrence neither differed between fire treatments nor from the control. However, burned plots showed a significant increase in the richness and occurrence of open savanna specialists, and a decrease in species most typical of dense savanna or dry forests. As ant responses did not differ between the annual, biennial, and adaptive treatments, we suggest that a fire return interval of two years is enough for reverting the loss of open savanna ant specialists in areas that have been protected from fire for decades.

1. Introduction

Fire is a natural disturbance with a long evolutionary history on Earth [1,2,3]. The presence of fire in some biomes is ancient [4] and we can find organisms with evolutionary adaptations to deal with it [5]. Some of these adaptations can be related to life history (survival and reproduction), protection, or even cooperation with fire [6,7,8,9,10]. The Brazilian Cerrado has records of fires dating back at least 32,000 years BP [11,12,13]. However, most of the fire adaptations and the diversification in plant lineages are from 4 million years BP or less, corresponding with the expansion of C4 grasses in the savannas [6,12,14,15]. Together with climate and soil, fire can affect the distribution—at both local and regional scales—of different vegetation types within the Cerrado, ranging from open grasslands to closed woodlands [16,17,18].
Human activities have already caused the conversion of over half of the natural Cerrado vegetation into areas devoted to ranching, agriculture, forestry, mining, or urbanization [19,20], while climate change has altered natural fire regimes [21,22,23]. In addition to these changes, fire is commonly seen as something negative to ecosystems by part of the human population, and in consequence, fire suppression policies have long been adopted by public authorities [24,25]. Since savannas are fire-dependent ecosystems [1,9], fire management policies that involve fire suppression can be harmful to the rich biodiversity of these open biomes, considering that fire suppression often leads to the encroachment of woody vegetation and the loss of savanna specialist species [26]. In addition, the accumulation of woody biomass in protected savanna areas can also result in the occurrence of high-intensity fires [18,27,28]. Therefore, a change in this policy is necessary, with the reintegration of fire into the landscape for the maintenance of the ecological processes and the native biodiversity of the Cerrado [24,25,29]. However, to achieve this, it is necessary to evaluate which fire regime is most effective for the conservation and maintenance of savanna biodiversity, also taking into account the local characteristics and conservation goals of the target areas. There is still little consensus on which fire regime to adopt, especially regarding the frequency, season and size of the area which must be burnt.
In this sense, long-term fire experiments can be an important tool for the responsible adoption of fire management practices [25,29,30]. Monitoring organisms over a long period allows for a better understanding of ecological processes involved in the resilience and resistance of biological communities [31,32,33]. Several experimental studies on fire have already been performed in savanna ecosystems, including those of Africa [34,35], Australia [36,37], and Brazil [38,39,40]. However, varying results are often been produced, especially when comparing studies performed in different biogeographic regions [41], or with different taxonomic groups [42,43]. In addition, there is some debate on the effectiveness of single versus multiple fire regimes. Pyrodiversity, defined as the spatiotemporal variation in fire regime characteristics (frequency, intensity, seasonality, among others), has been proposed as a mechanism that promotes biodiversity [44,45]. Nevertheless, there is still much controversy about the effectiveness of such a mechanism [46,47,48].
Ants (Formicidae) are a group widely used as bioindicators in studies about the effects of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on biodiversity [49,50,51]. They are diverse and abundant organisms and represent a large part of the animal biomass in terrestrial ecosystems [52]. There are several ecosystem-level functions in which ants are involved [53,54], such as nutrient cycling [55,56], decomposition [57], seed dispersal [58,59] and invertebrate predation [60]. Ant communities’ responses to fire tend to be variable, depending on the biogeographic region [41], type of vegetation [61,62,63], fire regime [48,64], or stratum where ants nest [28,65,66]. Furthermore, the degree of these responses may vary depending on the severity of fire and whether it causes direct effects on colony survival. Ground-nesting savanna ant species are generally resilient to the direct action of fire [63,65]. However, changes in the structure of ground-ant communities can occur when fire alters the structure of the vegetation [48,51,67].
Here, we evaluated the effects of different fire regimes on the ground-ant community from a savanna reserve in southern Brazil, where a process of woody encroachment and loss of savanna specialist species has been taking place [26]. In 2015, an experimental fire project was implemented in this reserve, and we previously showed that a single experimental fire event does not have an effect on ant diversity [40]. Here, we build on this initial study to describe the response of the ant community to the longer-term effects (~8 years) of different fire treatments (annual, biennial, adaptive and no fire). Over this period, the experimental plots were subject to up nine fire events. We hypothesized that the cumulative effects of the experimental fires would reduce the woody biomass, turning dense savanna areas into more open areas, thus allowing for the recolonization of open-savanna ant specialists. Since the effects of fire on ground-dwelling ants are largely indirect, mediated by changes in vegetation structure [51], we also hypothesized that the different experimental fire regimes we analyzed would result in different ant responses in that these same regimes would cause different effects on the structure of the savanna vegetation.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Study Site

We conducted the study at the Santa Bárbara Ecological Station (SBES), which is located in Águas de Santa Bárbara, São Paulo, Brazil (22°46′–22°51′ S, 49°10′–49°16′ W), at an elevation of 600 to 680 m a.s.l. [68]. The climate of the region, according to the Köppen classification, is Cfa, characterized by a wet summer and a dry winter. The average temperature of the coldest months is 18 °C and that of the hottest months is 23 °C, with annual rainfall ranging from 1000 to 1300 mm. The SBES reserve protects 2712 ha of Cerrado vegetation, but since when it was created in 1984, a fire suppression policy has prevailed, and consequently, a large increase in tree biomass was detected in most of the grassland and savanna areas (on average, a 37% increase in the Enhanced Vegetation Index from 1985 to 2015) [26].
The fire management experiment at SBES began in August 2015 [40]. A total of 30 plots of 0.1. ha each were established, of which 12 were in dry forest areas (cerradão), 12 in dense savanna (cerrado sensu stricto) and 6 in open savanna (campo sujo). The present study involves only the 12 dense savanna plots, which were subject to one of four burning treatments: (1) control (total fire suppression); (2) annual controlled burning; (3) biennial (every two years) burning; and (4) burning based on adaptive management. Plots of the adaptative management were annually burned for three years, but no effects were observed in the reduction in woody biomass. Thus, in May of 2018, woody plant species were cut inside and within a 10 m strip around the plot until the basal area was reduced to 10 m2 ha−1, a value corresponding to the structure of a typical savanna [69]. Cutting trees was expected to increase the fuel for burning and to favor the entrance of savanna specialist plants, especially grasses. Then, the prescribed burns continued to occur annually in these plots. All the prescribed burnings occurred in the middle of the dry season (winter), and at least after 60 days without rain.

2.2. Ant Sampling

The ant community from each of the 12 dense savanna plots was sampled on five occasions: in December 2014 (i.e., ~eight months before the first experimental burning, hereafter T−8 months), January 2016 (five months after the first fire event; T5), December 2016 (16 months after; T16), November 2020 (63 months after; T63) and December 2022 (88 months after; T88). The only exception took place in November 2020, when ant samples from an entire block (4 plots) were accidentally lost. Over these 88 months, the plots of the annual and adaptive fire regimes were experimentally burned 8 times, whereas those of the biennial regime were burned 5 times. However, in November 2019 a wildfire hit one annual, one biennial, and one adaptive management plot, and consequently, the first two were burned 9 times in total, and the latter 6 times (Table S1).
In each plot, a transect with five sampling points was established with a minimum distance of 20 m between them. Four pitfall traps were installed at each sampling point in a square of 2.5 × 2.5 m; i.e., the four pitfall traps were grouped forming one sampling point. These pitfalls consisted of buried 7.5 cm diameter plastic cups partially filled with a solution of water and soap. Pitfall traps remained in the field for 48 h and were subsequently collected and stored in ethanol (92.6%). Dry-mounted specimens were identified to the species level, whenever possible, using taxonomic keys or through comparison with specimens deposited at the ant collections from the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU) and Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR). When identification at species level was not possible, a morphospecies code was used.
Collected species were classified as open savanna specialists, dense savanna specialists or forest specialists using the Indicator Species Analysis (IndVal; [70]) performed earlier for the SBES ant fauna [71]. This analysis involved the ant data collected until December 2020 in all the 30 experimental plots (i.e., including plots in open savanna, in dense savanna and forest). For the current study, we revised and updated the species identification of all the specimens analyzed by Vasconcelos et al. (2023) and re-ran the IndVal analysis using the same procedure as that in their study [71]. Indicator values range from 0 (no indication) to 100% (perfect indication). For each species, the habitat with the largest IndVal was considered the most characteristic habitat. A Monte Carlo test was applied to evaluate the significance of the observed IndVal values (n = 4999 permutations and p < 0.05) (Table S2).

2.3. Vegetation Structure Measurements

Vegetation structure measurements were taken at the same transects and points where the ant sampling occurred (n = 5 sampling points per transect), but only at T63 and T88. Canopy cover was estimated using a concave spherical densiometer, positioned 1 m above the ground. We also visually estimated the amount of grass cover (in %) and the amount of above bare soil in each sampling point by positioning a 1 m2 quadrat on the soil surface. Litter depth (in cm) was recorded using a ruler. Four measurements of litter depth were taken within each 1 m2 quadrat. All measurements were performed by the same observer (REOSL).

2.4. Statistical Analyses

All statistical analyses were performed using the R software version 4.2.3 [72]. We determined the effects of the experimental fire regimes on vegetation structure (i.e., on canopy cover, grass cover, amount of bare ground and leaf-litter depth) 63 and 88 months after the beginning of the experiment, using linear models (one-way Anovas). Separate analyses were performed for each response variable and sampling period. Data on canopy cover, grass cover and percentage of bare ground were square-root- and arcsine-transformed prior to the analyses to meet the assumptions of data normality and homoscedasticity. Post hoc tests were performed using the Tukey method with the “emmeans” function from the package “car” [73]. Model assumptions were evaluated using the “plot_model” function of the “sjPlot” package [74].
We built linear mixed models, assuming a Gaussian distribution, to assess the effects of time since the beginning of the experiment and fire regime on the following: (a) overall species richness, (b) overall number of species occurrences, (c) species richness of open-savanna indicators, (d) number of species occurrences of open savanna indicators, (e) species richness of dry forest or dense savanna indicators, and (f) number of species occurrences of dry forest or dense savanna indicators. Number of species occurrences represent the number of samples (ranging from zero to five) in which each species was recorded in a given plot and sampling period, summed up for all species found in that plot. Separate linear mixed models were built for each response variable, considering fire treatment (4 levels) as a fixed factor, time as a covariate, and plot identity as a random factor. This analysis was performed using the “lme4” package [75], and model assumptions were checked using the Dharma package [76].
To evaluate the effects of time and fire regime on species composition, we built a matrix containing information about the number of occurrences of each ant species in each treatment and sampling period. Number of occurrences represented mean values as based on data obtained in all plots of each treatment (n = 3 plots per treatment). Data from plots belonging to the same fire treatment were combined so as to increase the completeness of our ant surveys as requested for the species composition analyses. Then, we calculated the dissimilarity between treatments and sampling periods using the Bray–Curtis index. The significance of the differences in species composition between treatments and sampling periods were assessed using Permutational Multivariate Analysis of Variance (PERMANOVA). These analyses were performed using the “vegdist” and “adonis2” functions (999 permutations) of the “vegan” package [77]. To illustrate the observed differences in species composition between treatments in the five sampling events, we built a two-dimensional ordination plot using Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) with the Bray–Curtis index as a measure of distance (dissimilarity). For this purpose, the “pcoa” function from “ape” package [78] was used. Finally, a linear model was built to determine the effect of time and fire treatments (excluding the control) on the dissimilarity between each of these treatments relative to the control.

3. Results

3.1. Vegetation Structure

We did not detect any significant difference in canopy cover (F3,8 = 1.27, p = 0.34), grass cover (F3,8 = 1.07, p = 0.41), percentage of bare ground (F3,8 = 2.58, p = 0.12), or leaf-litter depth (F3,8 = 3.15, p = 0.08) between the fire regimes as based on measurements taken 66 months after the beginning of the experiment. However, 12 months later (T88), we found significant differences in the grass cover (F3,8 = 6.51, p = 0.01), percentage of bare ground (F3,8 = 7.26, p = 0.01), and leaf litter depth (F3,8 = 11.28, p = 0.003) between treatments. On average, the leaf litter depth was 3.9 times greater in the control than in the annual, biennial and adaptive management plots (Figure 1). Mean grass cover and the percentage of bare ground were, respectively, 3.1 and 23 times greater in the burned plots than in the control plots. No significant difference between fire regimes was detected for canopy cover (F3,8 = 1.95, p = 0.19), although there was a clear trend towards less cover in the burned plots than in the unburned (control) plots (Figure 1).

3.2. Ant Species Richness

A total of 180 ant species belonging to 54 genera were collected in the five sampling events at the 12 dense savanna plots. The species with the highest frequencies was Pheidole oxyops (present in 213 samples), followed by Pheidole fracticeps (199 samples), and Pheidole sp. nr. angustinigra (186 samples). Eight months before the beginning of the fire experiment, a total of 120 species were recorded, whereas 5, 16, 63 and 88 months later, we recorded 114, 113, 104, and 123 species, respectively. We did not detect any significant difference in overall species richness between the fire treatments when comparing the total number of species collected in all plots from each treatment in any of the five sampling times (Figure S1—Supplementary Materials).
Similarly, when looking at the mean number of ant species per plot, we did not detect any significant difference between the fire regimes (χ2 = 0.69, DF = 3, p = 0.87) nor an interaction between fire regime and time since the beginning of the experiment (χ2 = 3.10, DF = 3, p = 0.37). However, there was an effect of time on species richness (χ2 = 10.23, DF = 1, p = 0.001), with a 9.7% increase on average (when comparing the first and final ant survey) in species richness with time in plots from all the different fire regimes (Figure 2A). Comparable results were obtained when considering the number of species occurrences per plot (Figure 2B). On average, the number of species occurrences increased by 25.3% from the first to the final ant survey (χ2 = 19.89, DF = 1, p < 0.001), but such an increase was similar in plots from all the different treatments, so this was not an effect of fire regime (χ2 = 1.31, DF = 3, p = 0.72) nor of an interaction between fire regime and time (χ2 = 2.68, DF = 3, p = 0.44).
In contrast, we did detect a significant interaction effect between time since the beginning of the experiment and fire regime on the richness (χ2 = 32.87, DF = 3, p < 0.001) and occurrences of open savanna specialist species (χ2 = 19.01, DF = 3, p < 0.001), indicating that the slope of the relationship between time and species richness (or between time and species occurrences) was different among the fire regimes. In fact, we found that over the study period, on average, the richness of open savanna specialists increased by 44.2% in the burned plots, while in the control plots, there was a 23.1% decrease (Figure 2C). Similarly, the number of occurrences of open savanna specialists increased by 58.7% on average in the burned plots and decreased by 6.6% in the control plots (Figure 2D).
In addition, we detected a significant interaction effect between time and fire regime on the richness of forest or dense savanna specialists (χ2 = 10.76, DF = 3, p = 0.013), as species richness decreased by 17% on average in the burned plots and increased by 38.9% in the unburned ones (Figure 2E). Similarly, while the number of occurrences of forest or dense savanna specialists decreased by 18.9% in the burned plots, that in the control plots increased by 45.8% (Figure 2F). However, this difference was not statistically significant (time x fire treatment: χ2 = 7.25, DF = 3, p = 0.064).

3.3. Species Composition

Our permutational analysis of variance showed that ant species composition changed over time (F4,19 = 3.63, R2 = 0.44, p = 0.001) and between fire regimes (F3,19 = 2.15, R2 = 0.19, p = 0.001) (Figure 3). This was because burned plots became increasingly dissimilar to control plots over time (F1,9 = 18.95, p = 0.001) (Figure 4). The relationship between time and dissimilarity to the control did not differ between the three types of fire treatments as there were no significant differences in the slope (time x treatment: F2,9 = 1.89, p = 0.20) or in the intercept (treatment: F2,9 = 0.17, p = 0.84) of the relationship when comparing the annual, biennial, and adaptive fire regimes.

4. Discussion

In this study, we evaluated the long-term effects of different fire regimes on the ground-dwelling ant communities from a savanna reserve in southern Brazil where fire was suppressed for decades. We found that overall species richness did not change over the 88 months of the experiment or across fire regimes, including the control unburned plots. This lack of changes in richness follows the same pattern seen in other studies in tropical savannas [64,79,80], even though in all these previous studies, in contrast to ours, woody encroachment was not an issue. Furthermore, like most of these studies, we found that fire can affect ant species composition. Notably, over time, ant communities in the plots that were burned became increasingly dissimilar to those in the control plots. The prevalence of open savanna specialist species increased in the burned plots while that of species typical of dense savanna or dry forests decreased. Interestingly, differences in ant species composition were only noted when we compared the burned versus the unburned plots, indicating that ant responses did not differ between the annual, biennial, or adaptive fire management regimes. Similarly, a study in the savannas of Kruger National Park in Africa showed that, even after almost 50 years of different prescribed burning treatments (varying in both frequency and time of fire), no significant differences in species richness or composition were detected among the various fire treatments, except when comparing the burned and unburned plots [64]. Comparable results were detected in the Kakadu National Park fire experiment in Australia, where differences in ant communities were restricted to the burned versus unburned comparison [36,66]. We also found that changes in vegetation structure after ~8 years of prescribed fires were very similar among the annual, biennial and adaptive fire management regimes. The lack of significant differences in vegetation structure between plots subject to different fire frequencies may thus help to explain why ant responses were also so similar among these same treatments. Our findings thus reinforce the view that the effects of fire on ground-ant communities are mostly indirect, mediated by changes in the structure of the vegetation [51].
In our area of study, decades of fire protection led to woody encroachment and a loss of savanna specialist species [26]. Our results showed how fire is an important factor in maintaining the habitat suitable for the savanna specialist species. The continuous presence of fire over the study period allowed the return or (or an increase in the occurrence) of the savanna specialist ant species in the burned plots. Since the effects of a single fire event on soil arthropods can be transient and no longer detectable after two years [81,82], recurrent fires are necessary to generate the changes we found. Furthermore, these results reinforce the idea that ground-dwelling ants in the Cerrado are resilient to fire [63] and that a single event does not have a short-term impact on community structure [65]. Postfire areas are characterized as more open habitats, often with a greater availability of resources [83,84,85,86], and this may generate environmental filters that favor the occurrence of specific species [87,88,89]. In this sense, investigating the extent to which fires affect the functional traits of ant communities is an important next step to understand ant community responses to current changes in fire regimes and its impact on the ecosystem services performed by ants [53].
Overall, our study indicates that a variable fire management regime (i.e., pyrodiversity) is not necessary for the return of open-habitat ant specialists in protected areas of the Cerrado, at least not when comparing dense savanna areas that were burned five to six times versus those that were burned eight to nine times over a ~8-year period. However, it must be pointed out that our results are restricted to a relatively small time window in terms of fire management, and thus additional and longer-term data are required to confidently test the pyrodiversity hypothesis in an SBES fire experiment. Studies in another Cerrado area, subject to different experimental fire treatments over 16 years, revealed that pyrodiversity does increase ant diversity [48]. This is because the creation of a mosaic of patches with different fire histories (and thus different vegetation structure), increases environmental heterogeneity [47,90] while maximizing the number of species coexisting at the landscape scale [48,71,91,92,93].
Although we did not find evidence in favor of the pyrodiversity hypothesis, it is clear that fire management in protected areas of the Cerrado is an important tool for the maintenance of savanna ant diversity and probably the diversity of many other animal and plant taxa too. Given the scarcity of empirical data, some authors have suggested that early dry-season fires, set every 4 to 6 years in a mosaic arrangement, would be adequate to maintain savanna biodiversity, and to reduce fuels and avoid catastrophic wildfires [94,95,96]. In our study, ant responses did not differ between the annual, biennial, and adaptive fire regimes. Therefore, we suggest that in areas that have been protected from fire for decades (thus leading to woody encroachment, as was the case at SBES) a fire return interval of two years, over a period of at least eight years, is required to minimize and eventually revert the loss of open savanna ant specialists.

Supplementary Materials

The following supporting information can be downloaded at https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/d17040276/s1: Figure S1: Sample-based rarefaction curves of the number of ant species; Table S1: Prescribed fire events that occurred in the 12 dense savanna plots at SBES between 2015 and 2022; Table S2: List of the ant species regarded as open savanna, dense savanna, or dry forest indicators according to Indicator Value (IndVal) analysis.

Author Contributions

R.E.O.S.L., H.L.V. and G.D. conceived the study and wrote the first draft. R.E.O.S.L., H.L.V., L.A.Z. and K.C.F.N. performed the field work. R.E.O.S.L. and K.C.F.N. performed the ant species identifications. H.L.V. and R.E.O.S.L. performed the statistical analyses. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

Financial support for the ant sampling, sorting, and identification was provided by the Brazilian Council of Research and Scientific Development (CNPq grants 304628/2020-4, 406435/2022-7, and 441166/2023-7), National Science Foundation (NSF grant DEB-1354943) and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES PhD-scholarship granted to the first author; Finance code 01).

Institutional Review Board Statement

This research project was carried out under Coordination of Technological Development (COTEC) research license #26108-008.476/2014, Environmental Company of the State of São Paulo (CETESB) fire license #035354, and Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) license #50658-1.

Data Availability Statement

The original data presented in the study are openly available in the Zenodo Repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15045360.

Acknowledgments

We thank Alan Andersen for commenting on an earlier version of this manuscript. We also thank Jésica Vieira, Elmo Koch, Jonas Maravalhas, and Renata Pacheco for their invaluable help with the field and/or laboratory work, and Rodrigo Feitosa for his help with the ant identifications. Finally, we thank W. Hoffmann for his involvement in the design and implementation of the experiment described here.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript:
SBESSanta Bárbara Ecological Station
PCoAPrincipal Coordinate Analysis

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Figure 1. Differences in vegetation structure (leaf-litter depth, bare ground, grass cover and canopy cover) between dense savanna plots subject to different fire regimes, as measured 63 and 88 months after the beginning of the fire experiment. The different letters above the boxplots indicate statistically significant differences between the fire regimes.
Figure 1. Differences in vegetation structure (leaf-litter depth, bare ground, grass cover and canopy cover) between dense savanna plots subject to different fire regimes, as measured 63 and 88 months after the beginning of the fire experiment. The different letters above the boxplots indicate statistically significant differences between the fire regimes.
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Figure 2. Scatterplots of the relationship between ant species richness and occurrences (number of species records per plot) and time since the beginning of the fire experiment ((A,B), all species; (C,D), open savanna specialists; (E,F), forest or dense savanna specialists). The black dashed lines represent the overall effect of time on species richness or occurrences, independently of the fire regime. Lines with different colors represent the significant interaction between the effects of time and fire regime.
Figure 2. Scatterplots of the relationship between ant species richness and occurrences (number of species records per plot) and time since the beginning of the fire experiment ((A,B), all species; (C,D), open savanna specialists; (E,F), forest or dense savanna specialists). The black dashed lines represent the overall effect of time on species richness or occurrences, independently of the fire regime. Lines with different colors represent the significant interaction between the effects of time and fire regime.
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Figure 3. Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) plot showing the differences in ant species composition between the different fire regimes prior to the beginning of the experiment (T−8), and 5, 16, 63 and 88 months later. Data from different plots (n = 3 plots per treatment) were combined for clarity as well to increase the sampling completeness per treatment. The colors indicate different times since the beginning of the fire experiment and ellipses indicated 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3. Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) plot showing the differences in ant species composition between the different fire regimes prior to the beginning of the experiment (T−8), and 5, 16, 63 and 88 months later. Data from different plots (n = 3 plots per treatment) were combined for clarity as well to increase the sampling completeness per treatment. The colors indicate different times since the beginning of the fire experiment and ellipses indicated 95% confidence intervals.
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Figure 4. Dissimilarity in ant species composition (relative to control, unburned plots) of plots subjected to different fire regimes in relation to time since the beginning of the fire experiment. The black dashed line represents the significant effect of time on the dissimilarity in ant species composition, independently of the fire regime.
Figure 4. Dissimilarity in ant species composition (relative to control, unburned plots) of plots subjected to different fire regimes in relation to time since the beginning of the fire experiment. The black dashed line represents the significant effect of time on the dissimilarity in ant species composition, independently of the fire regime.
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Leão, R.E.O.S.; Neves, K.C.F.; Zuanon, L.A.; Durigan, G.; Vasconcelos, H.L. Bringing Fire Back: How Prescribed Fires Shape Ant Communities in a Fire-Suppressed Neotropical Savanna. Diversity 2025, 17, 276. https://doi.org/10.3390/d17040276

AMA Style

Leão REOS, Neves KCF, Zuanon LA, Durigan G, Vasconcelos HL. Bringing Fire Back: How Prescribed Fires Shape Ant Communities in a Fire-Suppressed Neotropical Savanna. Diversity. 2025; 17(4):276. https://doi.org/10.3390/d17040276

Chicago/Turabian Style

Leão, Ruthe E. O. S., Karen C. F. Neves, Lino A. Zuanon, Giselda Durigan, and Heraldo L. Vasconcelos. 2025. "Bringing Fire Back: How Prescribed Fires Shape Ant Communities in a Fire-Suppressed Neotropical Savanna" Diversity 17, no. 4: 276. https://doi.org/10.3390/d17040276

APA Style

Leão, R. E. O. S., Neves, K. C. F., Zuanon, L. A., Durigan, G., & Vasconcelos, H. L. (2025). Bringing Fire Back: How Prescribed Fires Shape Ant Communities in a Fire-Suppressed Neotropical Savanna. Diversity, 17(4), 276. https://doi.org/10.3390/d17040276

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