Environmental filtering mediates desert ant community assembly at two spatial scales

Understanding the mechanisms that maintain species coexistence and determine patterns of community assembly are fundamental goals of ecology. Quantifying the relationship between species traits and stress gradients is a necessary step to disentangle assembly processes and to be able to predict the outcome of environmental change. We examined the hypothesis that desert ant communities are assembled by niche-based processes i.e., environmental filtering and limiting similarity. First, we used population-level morphological trait measurements to study the functional structure of ant communities along a dryland environmental stress gradient. Second, we developed species distribution models for each species to quantify large-scale climatic niche overlap between species. Body, femur, antennal scape, and head lengths were correlated with environmental gradients. Regionally, the ant community was significantly and functionally overdispersed in terms of morphological traits which suggests the importance of competition to ant community structure. Ant community assembly was also strongly influenced by environmental factors as the degree of functional trait divergence, but not phylogenetic divergence, decreased with increasing environmental stress. Thus, environmental stress likely mediates limiting similarity in these desert ecosystems. Species with lower climatic niche overlap were more dissimilar in morphological traits. This suggests that environmental filtering on ant functional traits is important at the scale of species distributions in addition to regional scales. This study shows that environmental and biotic filtering (i.e., niche-based assembly mechanisms) are jointly and non-independently structuring the ant community.