D3087: Effects of plant taxonomic diversity on lawn ant communities

Lawns have a ubiquitous presence in urban landscapes and are known for their general lack of plant diversity. This is important because as a dominant urban vegetation type, lawns play a major role in supporting or not supporting urban biodiversity. As in many other plant systems, ants are among the most prevalent terrestrial arthropods that can be found within lawns. In these systems, they play a critical role as predators of plant pests and ecosystem engineers. The composition of ant communities can serve as an indicator for the overall health of an ecosystem as well as its many components. Since lawns often lack plant diversity and plant diversity is often positively associated with biodiversity, we are interested in how lawn plant diversity may influence urban ant communities. Here, we investigate how lawn plant diversity influences lawn-dwelling ant communities by measuring their abundance and composition across a wide range of plant diversity. Specifically, we compare ants found inhabiting turfgrass genotypic monocultures, genotypic mixtures, inter-specific turfgrass mixtures, and inter-specific mixtures of turfgrasses and forbs. We quantified ant abundance and composition using pitfall traps and identified ants to genus. We also categorized ants as invasive if applicable. The results of this work may have important implications for urban biodiversity conservation.