Plant Community Succession on Ant-hills of a Sub-alpine Meadow in Northwestern Sichuan,China: Species Composition and Diversity

Ants may increase habitat heterogeneity by means of building ant-hills, thereby changing community species composition and ecosystem structure and functioning. We investigated plant height, coverage and abundance for each species and calculated species richness and diversity for ant-hills of Camponotus herculeanus differing in size (309.45cm2, 948.45cm2, 2124.90cm2 for the small, intermediate and large ant-hills, respectively). The dominant species was subsequently identified for the three size-classes of ant-hills and the mechanism underlying anthill community succession was derived. Our results showed that diurnal temperature fluctuation was greater in ant-hills than the surrounding flat soil, where the temperature of the ant-hills was higher in daytime but lower at night relative to the counterpart. The soil moisture was lower in center than in edge of ant-hills whose moisture was lower than the flat soil. Plant species diversity and richness were not significantly different among the three classes of ant-hills while the dominant species conspicuously changed. The importance value of the most dominant species, Kobresia uncinoides, increased significantly with increasing ant-hill size; the subdominant species was Galium aparine, Festuca ovina, Elymus nutans for the small, intermediate and large ant-hills, respectively. The dominance of grasses was significantly higher, but that of forbs was lower on ant-hills than in surrounding communities. The ant-hills were dominated by species from Cyperaceae and Gramineae while Compositae and Ranunculaceae dominated the surrounding communities. In addition, we discussed the possible mechanisms driving ant-hill community succession and the potential significance of ant-hills to the whole community composition and dynamics in the alpine meadow.